Cheryl Anne Stapp

A partial view of the former Rancho Refugio's 12,147 acres For practical reasons, the newly-minted United States of America adopted British common law, a legal system based on precedent and judicial decisions. One characteristic of common law was the tradition of primogeniture—the right of succession of the eldest son. Another was that married women were not recognized as “persons” in their own right, qualified to own property or anything else. Upon marriage, a woman became h

In the early years of the California Gold Rush, the “soiled doves” who flocked westward did so in the expectation of more opportunities...

All that’s left of it now are scarred hillsides, and huge mounds of low-grade gravel called tailings; waste-rock left over from the...

Official confirmation of California’s high-quality, wide-spread gold deposits sent an electric jolt around the world. Thousands of...

In a career that spanned several decades, her various nicknames included “Goldielocks,” “The Girl with the Curls,” and most of all,...

She died young but her influence endures, not least because several of her works are listed on the National Register of Historic Places....

A dark-eyed beauty, Francisca Carrillo was born in San Diego when California was still a province of Imperial Spain, and raised in the...

She was a poet, an editor, a teacher, a librarian, and a prominent figure in San Francisco’s literary community in the 19th and early...