Once lauded for their vision and promise, Silicon Valley giants have made life so hard for locals that residents regularly protest the companies, including their amenities like charter buses to save workers from the region’s terrible traffic.
AP Photo/Richard Jacobsen
Big technology firms are becoming known for mistreating workers, customers and society as a whole. Is an economic powerhouse about to collapse like Detroit did years go?
A San Diego rally against a scheduled visit by President Donald Trump.
AP Photo/Gregory Bull
Manuel Pastor, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
In the 1990s, older Californians struggled to make way for a younger, more diverse generation. Here’s how that ‘racial generation gap’ transformed the state – and what it means for the rest of the US.
Fires break out across San Francisco after the April 18, 1906 earthquake.
USGS
According to current forecasts, California has a 93 percent chance of an earthquake with magnitude 7 or greater occurring by 2045. Early warning systems, now in development, could limit casualties and damage.
Suspected infestation of Macrophomina phaseolina, a “novel” soil pathogen, in the non-fumigated buffer zone of a strawberry field.
Julie Guthman
California produces 90 percent of the US strawberry crop, but growers face curbs on toxic chemicals that have helped their industry expand. Can a system centered on mass production become more sustainable?
Worshippers depart a church service at the Crystal Cathedral megachurch in Garden Grove.
Jonathan Alcorn/Reuters
Heather Paxson, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
California’s artisan cheese-making industry has followed the changing tastes of the state’s population waves, from the mid-1800s through today.
Immaculate Heart College Art Department c. 1955.
Photograph by Fred Swartz. Image courtesy of the Corita Art Center, Immaculate Heart Community, Los Angeles.
Diane Winston, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism
In the ‘60s, a Roman Catholic religious order, the Immaculate Heart Sisters, created a new vision of a religious community. Meghan Markle, engaged to Prince Harry, attended the high school founded by the nuns.
Charles Manson leaves a Los Angeles courtroom in March 1970.
George Brich/AP Photo
Thousands of American women moved west to take advantage of wartime employment opportunities during WWII. For some, this version of the California dream was temporary; for others, it lasted a lifetime.
Aerial view of San Jose, California, 2016.
Gordon-Shukwit
Silicon Valley brought together natural surroundings, suburban homes and futuristic high-tech work. But industrial pollution betrayed the California dream.
A small – but powerful – Latino middle class has emerged in California, led by elites like State Senator Kevin de Leon.
AP Photo/Jae C. Hong
Post-World War II California built an unrivalled system of higher education combining access, affordability and choice. Then a contraction of the vision came in the 1980s.
While Prop 13 may have saved the California dream for some, it destroyed it for many others.
AP Photo/Lennox McLendon
Manuel Pastor, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
In 1978, Californians voted to pass Proposition 13, which slashed property taxes and ushered in an era of underinvestment, ending the ‘California dream’ for many.
Gary Griggs, University of California, Santa Cruz and Charles Lester, University of California, Santa Cruz
For 50 years California has used laws and policies to manage development along its 1,100-mile coastline and preserve public access to the shore. Climate change will make that task harder.
Old West, as seen through 1967 Orange County eyes.
Orange County Archives
Knott’s Berry Farm and others romanticize the state’s past and influence visitors’ sense of history. But their ideology reflects mid-20th-century political conservatism more than settlers’ reality.
A May Day protest in San Francisco. The state is at odds with the Trump administration on a number of policies, notably immigration and environment.
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
Associate Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Associate Director of the Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration at USC, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences