Cheryl Anne Stapp

All Hallows Eve is next Sunday, when centuries-old pagan beliefs insist that ghosts and goblins haunt old graveyards at the Midnight...

Does a life filled with adventure and diverse occupations beget a physically vigorous, mentally alert old age? That was certainly true of...

In October we start thinking about trick-or-treaters, and making plans to deck our porches with jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween...

Women were scarce in Gold Rush-era California, a mere 8% of the state-wide population in 1850, and only 30% ten years later, in 1860....

Families who trundled overland in covered wagons during the 1840s, hoping to build a better life in the West, didn’t always know to be...

In centuries past, and as global knowledge expanded in the Age of Sail, any attractive land that was scantily occupied and poorly...

What made some pioneer wagon trains successful, and others not? Partly luck, of course. But more than that, good fortune turned on the...

A number of modern structures in California’s southland bear the name of a family who settled there in the long-ago days when the Spanish...

Thousands of people poured into California during the 1850s: gold miners, merchants, farmers, families, professionals and tradesmen of...

Hundreds of Sacramento seniors still remember the acres of hop fields that stood tall along Fair Oaks Boulevard when they were kids....

Yet another new governor—in fact the sixth governor that authorities in Mexico City had appointed since 1822—arrived at Monterey, the...

Once an intriguing fable captures the collective human mind, it is very hard to dismiss it—especially if the stark truth is less...

Wine is big business in California. In 4,763 wineries large and small throughout the state, California vintners produce 87% of America’s...

It’s a hotel, restaurant and special events facility permanently moored at the Old Sacramento Riverfront now, but ninety-odd years ago...

Famed explorer John Charles Frémont, the leader of several U.S. Army Topographical Corps mapping expeditions across the West, gave the...

Dueling was outlawed in California at its pre-statehood Constitutional Convention in the fall of 1849. However, the penalty imposed for...

Today’s Sacramento History Museum, which opened to the public in 1985, is housed in a replica of the city’s 1854 City Hall and Waterworks...

In its heyday, Columbia was known as the “Gem of the Southern Mines” for its prodigious output of gold, averaging $100,000 or more per...

Once it was a good-sized mining settlement—a rip-roaring, wild-west boomtown. Today Bodie is a wind-swept ghost town, a tourist...

Hollywood! To movie fans all over the world, the name is synonymous with glamour, stardom, and cinematic dreams; a place also known—by...