Kill the Fourth-Grade Mission Report

But Give California’s Kids a New Assignment: The Histories of Our 33 Public Universities

My mission was San Luis Obispo de Tolosa, and I’ll never forget it.

I was barely 10 years old when I wrote my school report on that 18th-century Central Coast mission. But for me, as for so many California elementary school-age kids before and since, my mission assignment was the first real school report of my life. The facts remain embedded in my brain (along with the lyrics to a lot of bad 1980s pop music): Mission San Luis Obispo was the fifth mission, founded in 1772, and the first …

by Joe Mathews | April 10, 2014

The Rise and Fall of the Gum Tree

How California Came to Love—and then Disown—Eucalyptus

by Jared Farmer | January 3, 2014

Robinson Jeffers, a poet commemorated as an environmentalist, published a sonnet in 1916 that now seems eco-heretical. In 14 carefully rhymed lines, the laureate of Carmel offered praise to eucalyptus:

Thankful, …

Why California Keeps Repeating Junipero Serra’s Mistakes

Our Founding Father Showed Us Statewide Systems Don’t Work Here. More than Two Centuries On, We Still Refuse to Believe It.

by Joe Mathews | September 12, 2013

If Californians ever figure out a way to bring Father Junipero Serra back from the dead, the first thing we should do is put him in charge of the state …

The Bad Dad Who Cursed California

We’re Still Paying the Price For Hiram Johnson’s Toxic Relationship With His Father

by Joe Mathews | June 13, 2013

Why is California so hard to govern? One reason is that we’re suffering from daddy issues, and this Father’s Day is as good a time as any to confront them.

The …

California Historical Society’s Anthea Hartig

I Don’t Have a Case of the Mondays

April 26, 2013

Anthea Hartig is the executive director of the California Historical Society. Before participating in an a panel on how people re-invent spaces, she talked partying in 1920s Berlin, optimistic Mondays, …

Do We Need 150 More Years of Getting California Wrong?

If We Could Start Seeing This State as a Reality, Not Just a Symbol, We'd Solve a Lot More Problems

by Joe Mathews | April 4, 2013

California is a famously volatile place—lurching from boom to bust and from sunshine to natural disaster—but it’s nowhere near as volatile as the perceptions of California.

Only last year, the state …

California history