Cheryl Anne Stapp

San Francisco’s First Unitarian Church congregation gaped at its new pastor with a mix of curiosity and consternation. Could this small,...

By 1884 California was leading the nation in educational innovations with its system of pre-grammar-school schools, based on ideas...

During the centuries it belonged to Spain, and the few decades it was a province of Mexico, California had no homestead laws that gave...

California’s north-south cultural split began as early as 1821, the year Mexico won its independence from Spain and acquired the province...

In the aftermath of the Mexican-American War, California existed in a state of political limbo. The peace treaty, signed in February 1848...

In 1818, California was still an outlying province of Imperial Spain, even as New Spain (later, the Republic of Mexico) and other...

As Civil War hostilities rapidly escalated in July 1861—and United States Army personnel stationed in California left for eastern...

One hundred fifteen years ago last Sunday, on April 18, 1906—a Wednesday—a devastating earthquake struck the northern coast of California...

When explorer John Charles Frémont and his exhausted company of U. S. Topographical Corpsmen reached the Sacramento Valley trading post...

Twenty-four–year-old Rachel Hobson Holmes boarded the trading vessel Newcastle out of Boston in September 1831. She was sailing for...

In her own lifetime Eliza Farnham was nationally known as an author, and as an exceptional woman on the leading edge of several social...

California’s odd shape permits its northern port city of Eureka to be the most westward city in the continental United States—yet its...

If political discord is bad today, it was even worse in the mid-19th century. In that era, heated disputes often led to stabbings,...

Although it was the second newspaper published in California, the California Star was the first newspaper published in San Francisco. Its...

In 1865, the overloaded passenger steamer Brother Jonathan suddenly encountered severe winds and rough seas after leaving San Francisco...

California’s southern border was resolved in 1848 by international treaty after the Mexican-American War, but until 1849 its northern...

On October 3, 1863, following a Union Army victory at Gettysburg, President Abraham Lincoln announced to “the whole American people…in...

Theodore Dehone Judah was the brilliant engineer and visionary who convinced a group of Sacramento merchants, and the United States...

Hugh Campbell Murray was—and still is—the youngest chief justice of the California Supreme Court the state has ever had. He was...

This week marks the 109th anniversary of the election that awarded California women the right to vote…though initially, it appeared that...