After 1850, when California's statehood was ratified, the legislature met in San Jose until 1851, Vallejo in 1852, and Benicia in 1853, before establishing Sacramento as the permanent state capital. Sacramento was a major distribution center during the California Gold Rush and was the western terminus of the Pony Express.

According to a 2019 study published in Science magazine, an earthquake ripples through Southern California every three minutes, which equates to an astounding 175,000 earthquakes a year. Fortunately, most are so small that they can only be detected by scientific equipment.

Prior to serving as the 33rd governor of California from 1967 to 1975, Ronald Reagan appeared in such films as Kings Row, Dark Victory, Bedtime for Bonzo, and Knute Rockne, All American, the latter of which earned him the lifelong nickname "the Gipper." He would go on to serve as the 40th president of the United States from 1981 to 1989 and became a highly influential voice of modern conservatism.

The state is named after Califia, an Amazon warrior queen from Las sergas de Esplandián, a 16th century Spanish novel by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo.

On January 24, 1848, gold was discovered by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California, prompting the largest mass migration in U.S. history. The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad. The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, and the sudden population increase helped fast track California to statehood. In 1850, just two years after the U.S. government had purchased the land, California became the 31st state in the Union.

The Gold Rush conjures up images of thousands of '49ers heading west in wagons to strike it rich in California, but many of the first prospectors actually arrived by ship--and few of them had a return ticket. Within months, San Francisco's port was teeming with boats that had been abandoned after their passengers and crew headed inland to hunt for gold. As the formerly tiny town began to boom, demand for lumber skyrocketed, and the ships were dismantled and sold as construction material. Hundreds of houses, banks, saloons, hotels, jails and other structures were built out of the abandoned ships. Today, more than 150 years after the Gold Rush began, archeologists and preservationists continue to find relics, sometimes even entire ships, buried beneath the streets of the City by the Bay.

More Ice Age fossils have been found at the La Brea Tar Pits than any other site in the world--more than 600 species, from snakes and mollusks to saber-toothed cats and mammoths, for a total of more than 3.5 million fossils.

On June 14, 1846, while California was still under Mexican rule, a group of settlers in Sonoma proclaimed the state to be an independent republic. They created a flag that showed a grizzly bear, a five-pointed star, and the words "California Republic" above a red bar. This independence movement came to be known as the Bear Flag Revolt, and in 1911, the state adopted the Bear Flag as the official flag of California.

California's economy, with a gross state product of $3.0 trillion as of 2020, is the largest sub-national economy in the world. If it were a country, California would be the fifth-largest economy in the world.

California is the birthplace of the internet. On October 29, 1969, the first successful message was sent over ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline transmitted from an SDS Sigma 7 computer to an SDS 940 machine at the Stanford Research Institute. The initial message was inauspicious -- the letters "lo" were sent before the system crashed. He had meant to say "login".