In a momentous couple of years, the young United States added more than a million square miles of territory, including Texas and California.
Muir struggled for decades to create and protect Yosemite National Park, and helped launch the American environmental movement.
Fighting for labor rights in California's Central Valley, Dolores Clara Fernandez Huerta took up la causa in the name of children.
With five major exploring expeditions west of the Mississippi, John C. Frémont redefined the country — with the help of his wife’s promotional skills.
By war-making and shrewd negotiating, the 11th president expanded U.S. territory by a third.
Out of an agonizing American experience, the frail Scots author mined a treasure and carried it away with him
A junior Army officer, acting on secret orders from the president, bluffed a far stronger Mexican force into conceding North America's westernmost province to the United States
It was tough going, but the road over the Sierras could be used by men who understood how to travel
For the brilliant songwriter behind the Beach Boys, the endless summer gave way to a very hard winter. Now he is back, with a work that wants to be no less than a musical history of the American dream.
WILLIAM HEWLETT AND THE BIRTH OF SILICON VALLEY
Save for the Civil War, what occurred after a carpenter glimpsed a flash of yellow 150 years ago was the biggest story of the nineteenth century. RICHARD REINHARDT examines what we think we know (and don’t) about the people who made it happen.
AFTER TRYING TO PRODUCE DRINKABLE WINE for three hundred years, we finally got the hang of it—so effectively that in the last quarter-century our results have raised the quality of winemaking all over the world
What Human nature and the California gold rush tell us about crime in the inner city
Though it appears to have sprung up overnight, the inspiration of free-spirited hackers, it in fact was born in Defense Department Cold War projects of the 1950s
The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865, but right on into this century sailors were routinely drugged, beaten, and kidnapped to man America’s mighty merchant marine
The world about us is strewn with relics that are quietly eloquent of the struggle that ended half a century ago
The first caravans lumbered across two thousand miles of dangerous, inhospitable wilderness in 1843, the year of the Great Migration. To a surprising degree it’s still possible to follow something very like their route.
When you’re lining up a putt on the close-cropped green, there are ghosts at your shoulder. More than any other game, golf is played with a sense of tradition.
The author leads a search for hidden treasure in the amazingly complete documentary history of a California ghost town
To keep Upton Sinclair from becoming governor of California in 1934, his opponents invented a whole new kind of campaign
Americans have been doing just that since the days of the California gold rush—and we’re still not full
No city has more energetically obliterated the remnants of its past. And yet no city has a greater sense of its history.
From Fort Ticonderoga to the Plaza Hotel, from Appomattox Courthouse to Bugsy Siegel’s weird rose garden in Las Vegas, the present-day scene is enriched by knowledge of the American past
For many children who accompanied their parents west across the continent in the 1840s and '50s, the journey was a supreme adventure
California has always been as much a state of mind as a geographical entity. For the better part of two centuries, artists have been defining its splendid promise.
This puckish, nearly forgotten California architect built his own distinctive style on the simple principle that beauty alone endures
MIAMI DECO
An Unfortunate Affair at Fullerton Which at the End is Amicably Adjusted.