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Pasadena's Tournament of Roses was a 19th-century invention of the exclusive Valley Hunt Club.
Linguistic purity on the streets of El-Lay.
L.A. can hardly be called a winter wonderland, but Southern Californians have long found their own ways to celebrate the holidays, from candy-cane paint jobs on streetcars to postcards extolling the region's suitability for citriculture.
The Studio for Southern California History aims to document the region's history through a social and cultural perspective.
It's been nearly 70 years since the last recorded military attack on a Southern California land target. While conventional warfare in L.A.'s vicinity is an unlikely prospect today, in historical times war did occasionally mar the region's landscape.
Despite the diversity and ubiquity of palms in the Los Angeles area, only one species, Washingtonia filifera, is native to California. How then did the palm tree come to represent Southern California in the popular imagination?
West Hollywood was founded in 1896 as the town of Sherman, a settlement for workers on L.A.'s trolley system.
The Mayflower may have landed on the opposite coast, but Southern Californians have long marked the fourth Thursday in November with a Thanksgiving feast.
Exposition Park is known today for football games, dinosaur exhibits, and its sunken rose garden. But as its original name--Agricultural Park--suggests, the park's history reveals a time when farming in Los Angeles was not limited to rooftop skid row g...
On older maps of the city, Lincoln Heights is labeled "East Los Angeles," a name now used for a community three miles to the southeast. What happened--who moved East L.A.?
Although nostalgia abounds for Angels Flight and the Great Incline up Echo Mountain, these classic funiculars were hardly alone. Three incline railways from Southern California history have largely escaped the public memory.