California is the most populous American state and, taken on its own, one of the largest economies in the world. It runs about 800 miles down the Pacific edge of the country, which is enough latitude to hold rainforest in the north and desert in the south, and almost everything it is known for follows from that length.
It joined the union in 1850, a year and a half after gold was found at Sutter's Mill, and the rush is the reason it arrived already populous rather than filling up slowly the way Oregon did to the north. Sacramento is the capital; Los Angeles and the Bay Area are where the argument about the state usually happens.
Three states in one
- The coast. Cold water almost everywhere north of Point Conception, warm and swimmable south of it — the single fact that explains why Southern California reads as a beach culture and the north does not, despite both being on the same ocean.
- The Central Valley. Four hundred miles of irrigated farmland producing a large share of the country's fruit, nuts and vegetables. Most visitors drive through it without registering that it is the reason the state matters economically as much as the coast does.
- The mountains. The Sierra Nevada holds Yosemite, Sequoia and the highest point in the contiguous states; Death Valley, the lowest and hottest, is about eighty miles away from it.
What it exports
Two industries here shaped the century rather than merely succeeding in it. Hollywood settled in Los Angeles in the 1910s, for the reliable light and for the range of landscape within a day's drive of it, and set the form of commercial film worldwide. Silicon Valley, seventy years later, did the same for computing. Both are unusually concentrated: a few square miles of an enormous state.
The cost of that concentration is the state's central political problem. Housing near the work is scarce and priced accordingly, and the visible consequences in San Francisco and Los Angeles are what most national coverage of California is actually about.