“Nearly a decade before Jiminez discovered Baja California, Cortés had heard accounts of an island rich in pearls and gold and, ‘inhabited only by women without any men.’ Jiminez, then, may have known what to look for.”

Esplandian was published around 1510, “while our California, even the peninsula of that name, was not discovered by the Spanish till 1526 and was not named California till 1535.”

"The girls just had one dress and we’d fight. I’d throw them and the dress would tear and they’d cry and cry.... I tore my dress too, but I sure liked to wrestle.”

“The men started the fire, and the women watched to see that it did not approach the houses. When it did, it was beaten out. It burned the hills, all over, clean through to the next one.”

"Opossums are good food, the meat is real good. I still eat them when I have a chance, but now I’m getting old, and I care more for cottontail rabbits; they’re easier to find."

What struck visitors to the region was how freely families shared their plenty. “Housewives felt that food should not be sold to neighbors or those in need and gave of their abundances anyone who was hungry."

When Monterey’s presidio was established, the importance of San Diego’s fortification was diminished. San Diego’s harbor and climate were exceptional, but the surrounding country was not as fertile, so it became more of a way station.

Six men abducted Abraham R. Sauer, 65-year-old publisher of the San Diego Herald and an outspoken opponent of the police’s “Cossack” tactics. Just south of Escondido, they slipped a noose around Sauer’s neck.

Forster became Supervisor of the First District of San Diego — representing San Luis Rey, San Jacinto, Temecula, and San Pasqual. “He traveled to Sacramento to lobby for anew courthouse, a new jail…”

Bruschi invested in mines in Baja California, a ranch in Otay Mesa, and an interest in the Hotel L’Europe on Fifth Avenue and H Street. When the Ginocchio Company opened its store, in 1876, Bruschi managed it.

In an article for Mother Earth, Alexander Berkman said troopers reminded him of Russian Cossacks. The term “Cossack” became popular with Wobblies, “who used it frequently to describe the policemen they confronted.”

He rode his horse south, from San Diego around the southern shore of the bay. “The beach bordering the Pacific Ocean offered him a smooth path northward,” and he rode along a “crescent-shaped peninsula.”

When he returned to Minnesota, the malaria returned. So he made a systematic study of America's climates, found the most temperate, and, in January 1874, booked passage on a steamer for San Diego.

One group of neophytes at Mission San Diego refused to speak Spanish. Even when Fathers Fernando Martin and Jose Sanchez threatened punishment, the neophytes would not obey. The priests couldn’t understand “what reasons keep them from Spanish.”

While slavery was a part of Indian culture (“tribes throughout California captured individuals from enemy Indian groups and used them to cultivate crops”), most ethnographers agree that “prostitution did not exist in California aboriginal societies.”

On November 11, 1912, after giving warning, the police stormed through the Stingaree at 6:00 a.m. They hit the Oasis, at 416 Fourth Avenue, then made wholesale assaults on 11 other establishments. They arrested 138 women.

Frank Klaiger, owner of a bar on Sixth Avenue, accused Ada Maxwell of stealing $65. Klaiger went to Ada’s home at Fourth and island, and fired through a window. J. “Bull" Conrad, raced outside and punched Klaiger.

To commemorate Father's Day, this issue contains a collection of reflections from Reader writers about their fathers: The Last Tag Sale — Jeanne Schinto An Air of Exoticism — Duncan Shepherd Kinder Than I Would …

As my father lay dying, on June 29, 1990, I held his ice-cold hands. We didn’t say much, at first. Didn’t know where to start. Then I asked if the legend was true. His family …

Wartenberg testified that he saw Andronica Sepulveda riding toward San Diego from San Juan Capistrano earlier that week. Sepulveda asked the stage driver “if Estudillo was in San Diego. The driver told him ’No.’"

Optimists and pessimists differ about the glass being half-full or half-empty. But a graven pessimist would ask, “What glass?” The same applies to the Old Globe’s world-premiere musical, The Full Monty, based on the popular …

Soldiers from Company D, Third Artillery, formed the American Dramatic Club and performed the first “theatricals" in 1858. Officers’ wives and “local senoritas" played the female parts. Shows included The Lady of Lyons and The Idiot Witness.

Between 1854 and 1865, rented rooms and parlors of homes became temporary sites of education. Then, in 1865, the city erected its first building: the Little Green School on Mason Street.

Davistown: "Settlement named after William Heath Davis, who was the first to feel that the site of the city should be near the harbor. The settlement failed and Old Town remained 'San Diego' until 1868.”

During the 1930s, the black community began to have clearly defined borders. Blacks mostly resided in the area from 30th Street to 32nd Street, between Woolman (now Oceanview) Avenue and Logan Avenue.

Under an overcast sky, at 10:30 a.m. two dull explosions—a “rumble like distant thunder” — echoed across San Diego Bay. Steam erupted through the Bennington s deck amidships. Men splayed about, “tossed by the detonation.”

Robert Decatur Israel was born Thursday, March 23, 1826, in Pittsburgh. Son of a bricklayer — his parents were Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch — he came to San Diego as a young man and, from …

Ed Madruga, who owned the Paramount, recalled, “Two weeks afterwards, the government [took] all the tuna boats. Didn’t ask, just took ’em.” The government painted the whitehulled ships military gray and leased them “until victory.”

State Senator Ed Fletcher voted down the first proposed site for county fairgrounds: Crown Point on Mission Bay. Fletcher recommended a 184-acre in the San Dieguito Valley of Del Mar. Fletcher and his family lived in Del Mar.

During the first state-wide blackout in mid-January 1942, Dr. Roy Tanaka spoke to a patient on the phone in Japanese. The next morning two FBI agents escorted him to their headquarters at Sixth and Broadway.

“WOMEN DURING WAR: RESPONSES TO SITUATIONS IN SAN DIEGO, 1941-1945” — KIMBERLY A. HALL, MASTER’S THESIS, SDSU, 1993 When historians write about war, says Kimberly Hall, they usually write about battles, politicians, diplomats, “even military …

“The emigrants! Oh! Still they come. I never was in my life so annoyed. begging for sugar, flour, and god only knows how they have the face to push such entreaties as they do...."

On January 8, the San Diego Common Council passed an ordinance forbidding street-corner gatherings within 49 blocks of the city center. A month later, police arrested 41 men for violating the ordinance.

The war between Mexico and the United States began in May 1846 without the full support of Congress. The United States Navy occupied port cities in California, and the Army of the West, led by …

Quin, his wife Sue Leong, and their children lived in a two-story house on Third Street. Quin managed his store on Fifth and oversaw real estate holdings throughout Southern California.

Norma S. Damashek’s thesis examines the “micropolitics” of San Diego: how the “growth machine” dominates local land use and how institutionally embedded practices, “routinely employed by city government,” facilitate the planning process. She uses the …

A severe earthquake in December 1812 seriously damaged the church structure and killed 43 of the Indian worshippers in the church at the time. Everything seemed to go downhill for the mission after that.

The Bakers built a two-story house in Point Loma on nine-tenths of an acre. It was the only house in Point Loma for several years. They sailed to work downtown, making the trip in 20 minutes.

The greatest sport in this country is dancing. All the California women waltz. Our balls consist in Spanish dances and polkas — a few quadrilles & country dances are for the benefit of those who cannot waltz.

They couldn’t find water for days. When they saw a pond near an Indian camp, they raced through the natives, scattering them, dove in the water, and “overloaded our empty stomachs, and soon became as sick as death."

The automobile, the streetcar, and the motorbus enabled whites to move farther from downtown. They left older houses, in Logan Heights and Golden Hill, for new developments north and east of Balboa Park.

Hector renamed the site “Pio Pico,” because it’s across Otay Lakes Road from the campground by the same name. The site is 16,000 square meters and lies above Dulzura Creek, east of the confluence with Jamul Creek.

All the usual suspects: the Bard, Chekjov, Emilk D., Villon, whoever wrote the Book of Job—ditto the Book of Love. But instead of playing favorites, I'd much rather plug a few texts that knocked me …

On the Saturday before Easter, as afternoon clouds rolled in from the ocean and splintered the rays of the sun, the sidewalks along Girard Avenue in La Jolla undulated with pastel-clad shoppers who moved up …

For thirteen years, from 1946 to 1959, famed mystery writer Raymond Chandler lived and wrote in La Jolla, the small community that proudly juts outward into the Pacific. He had a love-hate relationship with the …

Criminal romanticizes his life

Putting a theatrical production together is like trying to cook a twenty-course meal — with every dish timed to come out of the oven at the same moment. On opening night, theater audiences witness the …

It’s time to talk trash in San Diego County. “The beast refuses to stay down, man Every day it grows, and then we knock it down Then another one grows right next to it, like …

“This is Bill Ballance, self-ordained lay therapist to those huddled, perspiring masses yearning to be stroked, eager to participate in the Bill Ballance communicative pentathlon, a certified incubator of soaring euphoria carefully programmed for the …

Inside the Armed Services Y.M.C.A.: a hotel, an old swimming pool, a coffee shop, a television room, family counseling, a friendly game of eight ball, chaperoned dances, the largest servicemen's center in the world, more …