CaliforniaBy: Kevin Starr

Rosy CaitoHistory 141Professor Arguello

Queen Calafia's Island: Place and First People

Theme: California known to the first Spanish explorers • In 1533, Spanish explorers ,

commanded by Hernan Cortez, landed on the newly discovered Pacific, believing that the land was an island.

• Around the year 1539-40 was when the Spanish realized that California was not an island, but a peninsula with area to the north that they would not be able to conquer for a few hundred years.

The different geographies that make California distinct

• 1,264- mile Pacific shoreline ; Coastal Plains

• 4 strategic intervals-bay of San Diego (south), Monterey and San Francisco bays (mid-region), and Humboldt bay (north).San Francisco is among the 3 finest on the planet.

• Mountain Ranges of California: Transverse Ranges, Peninsula Ranges, Klamath Mountains, Cascades ,Sierra Nevada's, Mount Whitney, Mount Shasta, and Mount Lassen

• Fault lines- the San Andreas, the Hayward, the garlock, the san Jacinto, the Nacimiento. San Francisco earthquake of April 18th,1906 shook the ;land at 8.3 on the Richter scale

The First Californians: Presence of Native Americans

• There were hundreds of thousands of native Americans residing in California for centuries before settlers had arrived.

• In the northwest were the fishing peoples, shell gatherers of the Central Coast, the hunter-gatherers of the interior, the agriculturists of the southeast

• Native American California offered a spectrum of linguistic and cultural diversity in the region before any settlers arrived to the area in a later era.

• They did not need elaborate hierarchies because they lived a simple, balanced life of hunting and gathering .

• Their culture and heritage was all about creation myths, totems, rituals and taboos.

Chapter 2: A Troubled Territory: Mexican California

• Theme: Mexican California’s Goal• Alta and Baja California were

classified as territory to Mexico in 1824

• The main goal of Mexican California revolved around the effort to create a civil society through secularization of the missions, foreign trade, and land grants.

• Over time, it was difficult for Mexican California to do this with a mixture of forces: international commerce, a growing population of non-Mexican residents, the collapse of local politics, presence of foreign powers from the pacific, and emergence of enlightenment ideas

Society of Mexican California

• Family was everything and was the fundamental fact and premise of social life

• After 24 years of Mexican rule, trade and commerce promoted secularization as Mexican Californians found their values, prosperity, and lifestyle modified by contact with the wider world

• Twenty -one missions were built of adobe by Indians under supervision on Franciscans.

American Presence in Mexican California

• A group of seventeen trappers connected to the Rocky Mountain Fur Company arrived in California on August 1826.

• They were led by Jedediah Smith, a Bible -reading explorer-entreprenuer, who constituted the first American penetration of California overland from the east.

• Smith had trouble bringing more men on an expedition into California though because his men were ambushed by Mojave Indians.

• Through out his journey, Smith linked California to the interior of the north American continent.

• Because of Smith, other trapping parties entered California in hopes of getting into the world of the Rocky Mountain fur trade .

Chapter 8: Making it HappenLabor Through The Great Depression

• Theme: Strikes and Unions• The General Strike of 1901

led to the formation of the Union Labor Party in San Francisco, which held power through the tenure of 2 mayors elected from their ranks.

• The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a loose federation of anarchists that wanted to seize the state and establish an industrial utopia, had a strike in San Diego in 1912.

• -5000 protested in front of a city hall and led to chaos

The Great Depression

• More than three hundred thousand agriculturist workers flooded California. They were all white Americans from the Great Plains and the Southwest.

• Wages went down by more than 50 percent.• Riots would take place because people were devastated.• Workers began to organize unions throughout Southern

California

The Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union ( CAWIU)

• Founded by the Trade Union Unity League, a national organization chaired by William Zebulon Foster.

• They organized a strike by 2,000 cannery workers in the Santa Clara Valley south of San Francisco.

• The CAWIU played leadership roles in 24 agricultural strikes in 1933

• They were involved in the largest single agricultural strike in the history of the nation: a cotton pickers strike in the San Joaquin Valley with 10,000 strikers.