内容简介

California denotes much more than a place-it implies a lifestyle, a space for ingenious, artistic, and enterprising leaders of society to live and play. Throughout the world, California is known as the place where wondrous things are invented and developed. It is the wondrous garden where everything grows and the magical place where movies are made.
　Historically, California's unlimited opportunities attracted countless newcomers, reaching back as far as the Native Americans. Others followed: the Conquistadors of the 1500s as well as the padres of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who built the 21 missions that stretch from San Diego to just north of San Francisco. In 1849, fortune seekers flocked to the Sierras for the Gold Rush, and the years after World War II saw the beginning of another population boom. So dynamic is life in the most populated of the fifty United States that, if it were an independent nation, California could boast the eighth largest economy in the world.