Page 20 - 2025-2026 Travel Guide to California

HISTORY
APPLE PARK, located in Cupertino, California, is the
sprawling corporate headquarters of Apple Inc.,
renowned for its futuristic design, right; the stark
but beautiful landscape of Death Valley, bottom.
California’s lustrous reputation was tar-
nished on the morning of April 18, 1906,
when a massive earthquake rocked
Northern California and leveled much of
San Francisco. What the rolling, rumbling
ground didn’t knock down, the ensuing
firestorm burned down. Some 3,000 people
died. Now, it was San Francisco’s turn to start
over. San Francisco dramatized its recovery,
and celebrated the new Panama Canal linking
the Atlantic and the Pacific, with the splen-
didly showy Panama-Pacific International
Exposition of 1915.
The Rise of Hollywood
Just two years after that optimistic display,
the nation plunged into World War I. After
the war ended in 1918, still more migrants
rushed to California. Thomas Edison’s
Motion Picture Patents Company, based in
New Jersey, held tight control over motion
picture cameras and who could make films.
These tight restrictions stifled innovation
and crippled the film industry so indepen-
dent filmmakers fled to California where
distance made it easier to evade litigation.
The reliable sunshine and temperature also
made it a more suitable place for filming
year-round. In 1920, Los Angeles (and much
later San Diego and San Jose) surged past
San Francisco in population. The orange
groves and dusty byways of old Los Angeles
began morphing into “LA”—more specif-
ically, and more mythically, “Hollywood.”
Actors, writers, directors and producers
streamed to Los Angeles, growing a quiet
cottage industry of silent motion pictures
into a technologically advanced business.
Stars were born in a place that came to be
called “the dream factory.” Not a few of the
Dust Bowl migrants who left the drought-
stricken Midwest for California in the 1930s
got their first impressions of their new home
from the dream-weavers of Hollywood. In
the 1940s, creative people from Europe such
as Billy Wilder and Thomas Mann, fleeing
fascism and war to begin anew, lent the
movies an Old World artistic sensibility.
California’s story since World War II has
featured growth and more growth. Com-
bined with in-country migration, global
immigration made California the most pop-
ulous state in the Union in 1963.
A Center for Change
From the 1960s on, California has been, in
a positive sense, the most disruptive state
in the nation. Student political activism,
NATURE’S
EXTREMES
THE HIGHEST POINT in the
continental United States, 14,505-foot
Mount Whitney, and the lowest point, 282
feet below sea level in Death Valley, are
about 100 miles apart in Southern
California.
18 2025-26 TRAVEL GUIDE TO CALIFORNIA
the hip counter-culture and early awaken-
ings of the New Age movement, found
fertile ground in California. The in-season,
sustainable, slow-food movement arguably
took root fastest in California. The state
became a hub for American environmen-
talism when Scottish immigrant John Muir
founded the Sierra Club in San Francisco in
1892. He later took President Theodore Roo-
sevelt camping amid the natural wonders
of Yosemite Valley in 1903.
From the 1980s on, Silicon Valley has
joined Hollywood as a creative lodestar for
the whole planet. In the present decade,
Silicon Valley reached northward, dra-
matically transforming the economy and
even the culture of San Francisco. The
high-technology world has enshrined risk-
taking, innovation, learning from failure
and—you guessed it—starting over. Quot-
ing another California innovation, the
1960s Whole Earth Catalog, Apple’s Steve
Jobs urged Stanford University graduates in
a commencement speech in 2005 to “stay
hungry, stay foolish.”
Californians, across centuries and cul-
tures, always have.
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