California has the nation's largest economy with a gross state product of $4.132 trillion as of Q3 2024. It is the world's largest sub-national economy, and would by most estimations rank 5th globally by nominal GDP. The state also leads the nation in agricultural output, led by its production of dairy, almonds, and grapes. With the busiest port in the country (Los Angeles), California plays a pivotal role in the global supply chain, hauling in about 40% of goods imported to the US. Notable contributions to popular culture, ranging from entertainment, sports, music, and fashion, have their origins in California. California is the home of Hollywood, the oldest and one of the largest film industries in the world, profoundly influencing global entertainment. The San Francisco Bay and the Greater Los Angeles areas are seen as the centers of the global technology and U.S. film industries, respectively. (Full article...)
The creation of a large park in San Francisco was first proposed in the 1860s. In 1865, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted proposed a park designed with species native to San Francisco. The plan was rejected for a Central Park-style park designed by engineer William Hammond Hall. The park was built atop shore and sand dunes in an unincorporated area known as the Outside Lands. Construction centered on planting trees and non-native grasses to stabilize the dunes that covered three-quarters of the park. The park opened in 1870. (Full article...)
If you want to surf, move to Hawaii. If you like to shop, move to New York. If you like acting and Hollywood, move to California. But if you like college football, move to Texas.
Marion Hugh "Suge" Knight Jr. (/ʃʊɡ/SHUUG; born April 19, 1965) is an American record executive, former NFL player, and convicted felon, who is the co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records. Knight was a central figure in gangsta rap's commercial success in the 1990s. This feat is attributed to the record label's first two album releases: Dr. Dre's The Chronic in 1992 and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle in 1993. Knight is currently serving a 28-year sentence in prison for a fatal hit-and-run in 2015.
Before founding Death Row Records, Knight played college football at UNLV as a defensive end. He briefly played in the NFL for the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the 1987 NFL players strike. In 1995, Tupac Shakur began serving a prison sentence of up to 4+1⁄2 years for a sexual abuse conviction. Knight struck a deal with Shakur that October, posting his $1.4 million bail and freeing him from prison pending an appeal of his conviction, while signing him to Death Row Records. In 1996, the label released Shakur's greatest commercial success, All Eyez on Me. That September, after departing a Mike Tyson boxing match in Las Vegas, a group that included Knight and Shakur assaulted Orlando Anderson, a Southside Compton Crips gang member. Three hours later, someone shot into the car Knight was driving, injuring Knight and fatally wounding Shakur. (Full article...)
Pelosi was born and raised in Baltimore, and is the daughter of mayor and congressman Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. She graduated from Trinity College, Washington, in 1962 and married businessman Paul Pelosi the next year; the two had met while both were students. They moved to New York City before settling down in San Francisco with their children. Focused on raising her family, Pelosi stepped into politics as a volunteer for the Democratic Party in the 1960s. After years of party work, rising to chair the state party, she was first elected to Congress in a 1987 special election and is now in her 20th term. Pelosi steadily rose through the ranks of the House Democratic Caucus to be elected House minority whip in 2001 and elevated to House minority leader a year later, becoming the first woman to hold each of those positions in either chamber of Congress. (Full article...)
Wally Bill Hedrick (1928 – December 17, 2003) was a seminal American artist in the 1950s California counterculture, gallerist, and educator who came to prominence in the early 1960s. Hedrick's contributions to art include pioneering artworks in psychedelic light art, mechanical kinetic sculpture, junk/assemblage sculpture, Pop Art, and (California) Funk Art. Later in his life, he was a recognized forerunner in Happenings, Conceptual Art, Bad Painting, Neo-Expressionism, and image appropriation. Hedrick was also a key figure in the first important public manifestation of the Beat Generation when he helped to organize the Six Gallery Reading, and created the first artistic denunciation of American foreign policy in Vietnam. Wally Hedrick was known as an “idea artist” long before the label “conceptual art” entered the art world, and experimented with innovative use of language in art, at times resorting to puns. (Full article...)
A graduate of the University of South Dakota and University of Minnesota, Lawrence obtained a PhD in physics at Yale in 1925. In 1928, he was hired as an associate professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, becoming the youngest full professor there two years later. In its library one evening, Lawrence was intrigued by a diagram of an accelerator that produced high-energy particles. He contemplated how it could be made compact, and came up with an idea for a circular accelerating chamber between the poles of an electromagnet. The result was the first cyclotron. (Full article...)
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London in 1903
John Griffith Chaney (January 12, 1876 – November 22, 1916), better known as Jack London, was an American novelist, journalist and activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction.
Before becoming an astronaut, Young received his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and joined the U.S. Navy. After serving at sea during the Korean War he became a naval aviator and graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School. As a test pilot, he set several world time-to-climb records. Young retired from the Navy in 1976 with the rank of captain. (Full article...)
Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson (born October 25, 1984), known professionally as Katy Perry, is an American singer, songwriter, and television personality. Perry is one of the best-selling music artists in history, having sold over 143 million units worldwide. She is known for her influence on pop music and her camp style, being dubbed the "Queen of Camp" by Vogue and Rolling Stone.
At 16, Perry released a gospel record titled Katy Hudson (2001) under Red Hill Records, which was commercially unsuccessful. She moved to Los Angeles at 17 to venture into secular music, and later adopted the stage name "Katy Perry" from her mother's maiden name. She recorded an album while signed to Columbia Records, but was dropped before signing to Capitol Records. Perry rose to fame with One of the Boys (2008), a pop rock record containing her debut single "I Kissed a Girl" and follow-up single "Hot n Cold", which reached number one and three on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 respectively. (Full article...)
Ruth E. Norman (born Ruth Nields; August 18, 1900 – July 12, 1993), also known as Uriel, was an American religious leader who co-founded the Unarius Academy of Science, based in Southern California. Raised in California, Norman received little education and worked from an early age in a variety of jobs. In the 1940s, she developed an interest in psychic phenomena and past-life regression. These pursuits led to her introduction to Ernest Norman, a self-described psychic, in 1954. He engaged in channeling, past-life regression, and attempts at communication with extraterrestrials. She married Ernest, her fourth husband, in the mid-1950s. Together they published several books about his revelations and formed Unarius, an organization which later became known as the Unarius Academy of Science, to popularize his teachings. The couple discussed numerous details about their alleged past lives and spiritual visits to other planets, forming a mythology from these accounts.
After Ernest died in 1971, Ruth succeeded him as their group's leader and primary channeler. She subsequently began publishing accounts of her experiences and revelations. In early 1974, she predicted that a space fleet of benevolent extraterrestrials, the Space Brothers, would land on Earth later that year, which led the Unarius Academy to purchase a property to serve as the landing site. After the extraterrestrials failed to appear, Norman said that trauma she had suffered in a past life had caused her to make an inaccurate prediction. Undaunted, she rented a building for Unarius' meetings and sought publicity for the movement, claiming to have united the Earth with an interplanetary confederation. She revised the Space Brothers' expected landing date several times, before finally settling on 2001. Her health declined in the late 1980s, prompting her students to try to heal her with rituals of past-life regression. Despite predicting that she would live to see the extraterrestrials land, Norman died in 1993. Unarius has continued to operate after her death, and formed a board of directors. Since the 2000s, leaders have concentrated on individual transformation leading to spiritual change in humankind. (Full article...)
Industry (or City of Industry) is a city in the San Gabriel Valley section of Los Angeles County, California, United States. It was incorporated June 18, 1957. The population was 777 at the 2000 census. The city was incorporated to prevent surrounding cities from annexing industrial land for tax revenue.
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