New York City
The City of New York called either New York City or New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles, New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural and media capital of the world, exerts a significant impact upon commerce, research, education, tourism, art and sports; the city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.
Situated on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of, a separate county of the State of New York. The five boroughs – Brooklyn, Manhattan, The Bronx, Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898; the city and its metropolitan area constitute the premier gateway for legal immigration to the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. New York City is home to more than 3.2 million residents born outside the United States, the largest foreign-born population of any city in the world. In 2017, the New York metropolitan area produced a gross metropolitan product of US$1.73 trillion. If greater New York City were a sovereign state, it would have the 12th highest GDP in the world. New York is home to the highest number of billionaires of any city in the world. New York City traces its origins to a trading post founded by colonists from the Dutch Republic in 1624 on Lower Manhattan.
The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, the Duke of York. New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790, it has been the country's largest city since 1790. The Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the U. S. by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is an international symbol of the U. S. and its ideals of liberty and peace. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a global node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance, environmental sustainability, as a symbol of freedom and cultural diversity. Many districts and landmarks in New York City are well known, with the city having three of the world's ten most visited tourist attractions in 2013 and receiving a record 62.8 million tourists in 2017. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world. Times Square, iconic as the world's "heart" and its "Crossroads", is the brightly illuminated hub of the Broadway Theater District, one of the world's busiest pedestrian intersections, a major center of the world's entertainment industry.
The names of many of the city's landmarks and parks are known around the world. Manhattan's real estate market is among the most expensive in the world. New York is home to the largest ethnic Chinese population outside of Asia, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is the largest single-operator rapid transit system worldwide, with 472 rail stations. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, Rockefeller University, which have been ranked among the top universities in the world. Anchored by Wall Street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan, New York has been called both the most economically powerful city and the leading financial center of the world, the city is home to the world's two largest stock exchanges by total market capitalization, the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ. In 1664, the city was named in honor of the Duke of York.
James's older brother, King Charles II, had appointed the Duke proprietor of the former territory of New Netherland, including the city of New Amsterdam, which England had seized from the Dutch. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, 75,000 to 11,000 years ago, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth; the erosive forward movement of the ice contributed to the separation of what is now Long Island and Staten Island. That action left bedrock at a shallow depth, providing a solid foundation for most of Manhattan's skyscrapers. In the precolonial era, the area of present-day New York City was inhabited by Algonquian Native Americans, including the Lenape, whose homeland, known as Lenapehoking, included Staten Island; the first documented visit into New York Harbor by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown. He named it Nouvelle Angoulême. A Spanish expedition led by captain Estêvão Gomes, a Portuguese sailing for Emperor Charles V, arrived in New York Harbor in January 1525 and charted the mouth of the Hudson River, which he named Río de San Antonio.
The Padrón Rea
IMAX
IMAX is a system of high-resolution cameras, film formats, film projectors and theaters known for having large screens with a tall aspect ratio and steep stadium seating. Graeme Ferguson, Roman Kroitor, Robert Kerr, William C. Shaw were the co-founders of what would be named the IMAX Corporation, they developed the first IMAX cinema projection standards in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Canada. Unlike conventional projectors, the film runs horizontally so that the image width is greater than the width of the film; when IMAX was introduced, it was a radical change in the movie-going experience. Viewers were treated to the scene of a curved giant screen more than seven stories tall and steep stadium seating that made for a visually immersive experience, along with a sound system, far superior to the audio at typical theaters in the years prior to the advent of THX; some IMAX theaters have a dome screen geometry which can give the viewer an more immersive feel. Over the decades since its introduction, IMAX evolved to include "3D" stereoscopic films, introduced in January 1998, began to proliferate with a transition away from analog film into the digital era.
Beginning in May of 1991, a visceral dimension of the movie experience was added by having the audience's seats mounted on a full-motion platform as an amusement park ride in IMAX ride film theaters. Switching to digital projection, introduced in July 2008, came at a steep cost in image quality, with 2K projectors having an order of magnitude less resolution. Maintaining the same 7-story giant screen size would only make this loss more noticeable, so many new theaters were being built with smaller screen sizes, yet being marketed with the same brand name of "IMAX"; these newer theaters with the much lower resolution and much smaller screens were soon being referred to by the derogatory name "LieMAX" because the company did not make this major distinction clear to the public, going so far as to build the smallest "IMAX" screen having 10 times less area than the largest while persisting with the exact same brand name. Since 2002, some feature films have been converted into IMAX format for displaying in IMAX theatres, some have been shot in IMAX.
By late 2017, 1,302 IMAX theatre systems were installed in 1,203 commercial multiplexes, 13 commercial destinations, 86 institutional settings in 75 countries, with less than a quarter of these having the capability to show 70mm film at the resolution of the large format as conceived. The IMAX film standard uses 70 mm film run through the projector horizontally; this technique produces an area, nine times larger than the 35 mm format, three times larger than 70 mm film, run conventionally through the projector in a vertical orientation. The desire to increase the visual impact of film has a long history. In 1929, Fox introduced Fox Grandeur, the first 70 mm film format, but it fell from use. In the 1950s, the potential of 35 mm film to provide wider projected images was explored in the processes of CinemaScope and VistaVision, following multi-projector systems such as Cinerama. While impressive, Cinerama was difficult to install. During Expo 67 in Montreal, the National Film Board of Canada's In the Labyrinth and Ferguson's Man and the Polar Regions both used multi-projector, multi-screen systems.
Each encountered technical difficulties that led them to found a company called "Multiscreen", with a goal of developing a simpler approach. The single-projector/single-camera system they settled upon was designed and built by Shaw based upon a novel "Rolling Loop" film-transport technology purchased from Peter Ronald Wright Jones, a machine shop worker from Brisbane, Australia. Film projectors do not continuously flow the film in front of the bulb, but instead "stutter" the film travel so that each frame can be illuminated in a momentarily paused flicker; this requires a mechanical apparatus to stagger the travel of the film strip. The older technology of running 70 mm film vertically through the projector used only five sprocket perforations on the sides of each frame, however the IMAX method used fifteen perforations per frame; the previous mechanism was inadequate to handle this mechanical staggering, three time larger, so Jones's invention was necessary for the novel IMAX projector method with its horizontal film feed.
As it became clear that a single, large-screen image had more impact than multiple smaller ones and was a more viable product direction, Multiscreen changed its name to IMAX. Cofounder Graeme Ferguson explained how the name IMAX originated: "... the incorporation date September, 1967.... Came a year or two later. We first called the company Multiscreen Corporation because that, in fact, was what people knew us as.... After about a year, our attorney informed us that we could never trademark Multivision, it was too generic. It was a descriptive word; the words that you can copyright are words like Xerox or Coca-Cola. If the name is descriptive, you can't trademark it. So we were sitting at lunch one day in a Hungarian restaurant in Montreal and we worked out a name on a place mat on which we wrote all the possible names we could think of. We kept working with the idea of maximum image. We turned it around and came up with IMAX." The name change happened more than two years because a key patent filed on January 16, 1970, was assigned under the original name Multiscreen Corporation, Limited.
IMAX Chief Administration O
Michael Bloomberg
Michael Rubens Bloomberg KBE is an American businessman, politician and philanthropist. As of March 2019, his net worth was estimated at $55.5 billion, making him the 8th-richest person in the United States and the 9th richest person in the world. He has joined The Giving Pledge, whereby billionaires pledge to give away at least half of their wealth. To date, Bloomberg has given away $8.2 billion, including his November 2018 $1.8 billion gift to Johns Hopkins University for student aid — the largest private donation made to a higher education institution. Bloomberg is one of the founders, CEO, owner of Bloomberg L. P. a global financial services and mass media company that bears his name, is notable for its Bloomberg Terminal, a computer software system providing financial data used in the global financial services industry. He began his career at the securities brokerage Salomon Brothers, before forming his own company in 1981 and spending the next twenty years as its chairman and CEO. Bloomberg served as chair of the board of trustees at his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, from 1996 to 2002.
Bloomberg served as the 108th Mayor of New York City, holding office for three consecutive terms, beginning his first in 2001. A Democrat before seeking elective office, Bloomberg switched his party registration in 2001 to run for mayor as a Republican, he defeated opponent Mark Green in a close election held just weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks. He won a second term in 2005, left the Republican Party two years later. Bloomberg campaigned to change the city's term limits law, was elected to his third term in 2009 as an Independent on the Republican ballot line. Bloomberg was mentioned as a possible centrist candidate for the U. S. Presidential elections in 2008, 2012, as well as for Governor of New York in 2010, he declined opting to continue serving as the mayor of New York City. His final term as mayor ended on January 1, 2014. After a brief stint as a full-time philanthropist, Bloomberg re-assumed the position of CEO at Bloomberg L. P. by the end of 2014. On March 7, 2016, Bloomberg announced that he would not run as a third party candidate in the 2016 U.
S. presidential election despite widespread speculation that he would, endorsed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton for president. In October 2018, Bloomberg announced that he had changed his political party affiliation to Democratic, which he had been registered as prior to 2001. Michael Bloomberg was born at St. Elizabeth's Hospital, in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts on February 14, 1942. Bloomberg's family is Jewish. Bloomberg is a prominent member of the Emanu-El Temple in Manhattan. Bloomberg's father, William Henry Bloomberg, was born in Chelsea and worked as an accountant for a dairy company, he was the son of an immigrant from Russia. The Bloomberg Center at the Harvard Business School was named in William Henry's honor, his mother, Charlotte Bloomberg was a native of New Jersey. Bloomberg's maternal grandfather, Max Rubens, was an immigrant from; the family lived in Allston until Bloomberg was two years old, when they moved to Brookline for the next two years settling in the Boston suburb of Medford, where he lived until after he graduated from college.
Bloomberg is an Eagle Scout. Bloomberg attended Johns Hopkins University, where he joined the fraternity Phi Kappa Psi. In 1962, as a sophomore, he constructed the school mascot's costume, he graduated in 1964 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering. In 1966 he graduated from Harvard Business School with a Master of Business Administration. In 1973, Bloomberg became a general partner at Salomon Brothers, a bulge-bracket Wall Street investment bank, where he headed equity trading and systems development. In 1981, Salomon Brothers was bought by Phibro Corporation, Bloomberg was laid off from the investment bank, he owned $10 million worth of equity as a partner at the firm. Using this money, Bloomberg went on to set up a company named Innovative Market Systems, his business plan was based on the realization that Wall Street was willing to pay for high-quality business information, delivered as as possible and in as many usable forms possible, via technology. In 1982, Merrill Lynch became the new company's first customer, installing 22 of the company's Market Master terminals and investing $30 million in the company.
The company was renamed Bloomberg L. P. in 1987. By 1990, it had installed 8,000 terminals. Over the years, ancillary products including Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Message, Bloomberg Tradebook were launched; as of October 2015, the company had more than 325,000 terminal subscribers worldwide. His company has a radio network which has 1130 WBBR AM in New York City as its flagship station, he left the position of CEO to pursue a political career as the mayor of New York City. Bloomberg was replaced as CEO by Lex Fenwick. During Bloomberg's three mayoral terms, the company was led by president Daniel L. Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor under Bloomberg. After completing his final term as the mayor of New York City, Bloomberg spent his first eight months out of office as a full-time philanthropist. In fall 2014, he announced that he would return to Bloomberg L. P. as CEO at the end of 2014, succeeding Doctoroff, who had led the company since retiring from the Bloomberg administration in February 2008. Bloomberg remains the CEO of Bloomberg L.
P. Bloomberg is a member of Kap
Charles Hayden (banker)
Charles Hayden was an American banker, businessman and philanthropist. He was the senior partner of Hayden, Stone & Co. and his influence was such that James W. Gerard listed him among those "who are too busy to hold political office, but determine who shall." Noted contributions bearing his name include the Hayden Planetarium in New York, the Charles Hayden Planetarium at Boston's Museum of Science, the Charles Hayden Foundation. Instrumental in the financing of Arizona copper mines and smelters, the smelting community of Hayden, Arizona was named for him. Hayden was born in Massachusetts to Josiah Willard Hayden and Emma A. Hayden, his father was a shoe and leather merchant and he was educated in the public schools before enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hayden studied mining investment and graduated in 1890. Following graduation, he traveled for a year before taking a position as clerk with the Boston bank of Clark, Ward, & Co. Hayden lived at the Savoy-Plaza Hotel in Manhattan.
His hobbies included bridge. In 1892, Hayden joined with fellow Clark, Ward, & Co. clerk Galen L. Stone to open Hayden, Stone & Co. Hayden gained mastery of the brokerage business. Foreseeing the needs of electrification, Hayden made his fortune by investing in copper mining; the new investment firm prospered, expanding from its Boston base to open a New York City branch in 1906. In addition to his brokerage firm, Hayden was involved in other business operations. During his lifetime he was appointed director to 89 companies, held 58 directorships at the time of his death. Hayden was involved with philanthropy most of his life. During the First World War, he donated US$100,000 per year to the American Red Cross, he became interested in helping youth and in 1926 was revealed to have anonymously donated US$100,000 to establish an uptown New York City branch of the Boys Club. This was followed in 1933 when, at the request of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hayden chaired the Boy Scout Maintenance Fund for the Boy Scouts of America.
In addition to youth, Hayden donated to aid the poor. In 1934, he donated US$150,000 to New York's American Museum of Natural History for creation of a planetarium, named after him; this was followed the next year when he headed a committee which raised $9,440,000 to save New York's charitable hospitals. Hayden is notable for his donations to Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey; the campus is home to a residence hall. Hayden's largest philanthropic effort came following his death on January 8, 1937 when his will directed US$50,000,000 from his estate be used to create a foundation to advance the education and "moral and physical well-being" of boys and young men; the Charles Hayden Foundation makes grants of between US$10,000,000 and US$20,000,000 annually to support programs for children in the Boston and New York metropolitan areas
Greater Boston
Greater Boston is the metropolitan region of New England encompassing the municipality of Boston, the capital of the U. S. state of Massachusetts, the most populous city in New England, as well as its surrounding areas. The region forms the northern arc of the US northeast megalopolis and as such, Greater Boston can be described either as a metropolitan statistical area, or as a broader combined statistical area; the MSA consists of most of the eastern third of Massachusetts, excluding the South Coast region and Cape Cod. While the small footprint of the city of Boston itself only contains an estimated 685,094, the urbanization has extended well into surrounding areas; some of Greater Boston's most well-known contributions involve the region's higher education and medical institutions. Greater Boston has been influential upon American industry; the region and the state of Massachusetts are global leaders in biotechnology, higher education and maritime trade. Over 80% of Massachusetts' population lives in the Greater Boston metropolitan region.
Greater Boston is ranked tenth in population among US metropolitan statistical areas, home to 4,732,161 people as of the 2014 US Census estimate, sixth among combined statistical areas, with a population of 8,099,575. The area has hosted many people and sites significant to American culture and history American literature and the American Revolution. Plymouth was the site of the first colony in New England, founded in 1620 by the Pilgrims, passengers of the Mayflower. In 1692, the town of Salem and surrounding areas experienced one of America's most infamous cases of mass hysteria, the Salem witch trials. In the late 18th century, Boston became known as the "Cradle of Liberty" for the agitation there that led to the American Revolution; the Greater Boston region has played a powerful commercial and cultural role in the history of the United States. Before the American Civil War, the region was a center for the abolitionist and transcendentalist movements. In 2004, Massachusetts became the first U.
S. state to recognize same-sex marriage as a result of the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in Boston. Many prominent American political dynasties have hailed from the Boston region, including the Adams and Kennedy families. Harvard University in Cambridge is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, with the largest financial endowment of any university, whose Law School has spawned a contemporaneous majority of United States Supreme Court Justices. Kendall Square in Cambridge has been called "the most innovative square mile on the planet", in reference to the high concentration of entrepreneurial start-ups and quality of innovation which have emerged in the vicinity of the square since 2010. Both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, have been ranked among the most regarded academic institutions in the world; the most restrictive definition of the Greater Boston area is the region administered by the Metropolitan Area Planning Council.
The MAPC is a regional planning organization created by the Massachusetts legislature to oversee transportation infrastructure and economic development concerns in the Boston area. The MAPC includes 101 towns that are grouped into eight subregions; these include most of the area within the region's outer circumferential highway, I-495. In 2013, the population of the MAPC district was 3.2 million, 48% of the total population of Massachusetts, in an area of 1,422 square miles, of which 39% is forested and an additional 11% is water, wetland, or other open space. The eight subregions and their principal towns are: Inner Core, MetroWest, North Shore, North Suburban, South Shore, SouthWest, Three Rivers. Notably excluded from the MAPC and its partner planning body, the Boston Region Metropolitan Planning Organization, are the Merrimack Valley cities of Lowell and Haverhill, much of Plymouth County, all of Bristol County. Bristol County is part of the Greater Boston CSA, as part of the Providence MSA.
The urbanized area surrounding Boston serves as the core of a definition used by the US Census Bureau known as the New England city and town area. The set of towns containing the core urbanized area plus surrounding towns with strong social and economic ties to the core area is defined as the Boston–Cambridge–Nashua, MA–NH Metropolitan NECTA; the Boston NECTA is further subdivided into several NECTA divisions. The Boston and Peabody NECTA divisions together correspond to the MAPC area; the total population of the Boston NECTA was 4,540,941. Boston–Cambridge–Newton, MA NECTA Division Framingham, MA NECTA Division Peabody–Salem–Beverly, MA NECTA Division Brockton–Bridgewater–Easton, MA NECTA Division Haverhill–Newburyport–Amesbury, MA–NH NECTA Division Lawrence–Methuen–Salem, MA–NH NECTA Division (part of Merrimack V
Campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is located on a 168-acre tract in Cambridge, United States. The campus spans one mile of the north side of the Charles River basin directly opposite the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts; the campus includes dozens of buildings representing diverse architectural styles and shifting campus priorities over MIT's history. MIT's architectural history can be broadly split into four eras: the Boston campus, the new Cambridge campus before World War II, the "Cold War" development, post-Cold War buildings; each era was marked by distinct builds representing neoclassical, modernist and deconstructivist styles which alternatively represent a commitment to utilitarian minimalism and embellished exuberance. The geographical organization of the MIT campus is much easier to understand by referring to the MIT map, in online interactive, or downloadable printable form. There is an MIT Accessibility Campus Map available for download, useful for mobility-impaired visitors.
Buildings 1–10 were the original main campus, with Building 10, the location of the Great Dome, designed to be the ceremonial main entrance. The actual street entrance leads from 77 Massachusetts Avenue into the lobby of Building 7, at the western end of the "Infinite Corridor", which forms the east-west axis of the main group of buildings. Buildings 1–8 are arranged symmetrically around Building 10, with odd-numbered buildings to the west and even-numbered buildings to the east. In general, higher numbers are assigned to buildings as distance from the center of campus increases; the east side of main campus has "the 6s", several connecting buildings that end with the digit 6. The "30s" series buildings run along Vassar Street on the north side of main campus. Buildings that are East of Ames Street are prefixed with an E. Two buildings at the far west end of campus are designated "WW15" and "WW25"; the prefix NE is used for buildings north of Main Street for structures located due north of other buildings designated with N.
Buildings that are far from the main campus are prefixed OC, for off campus. There are no buildings prefixed with S, since the campus is bordered at its southern edge by the Charles River. To identify a particular room within a building, the room number is appended to the building number, using a "-"; the floor number is indicated in the usual way, by the leading digit of the room number, with a leading digit 0 indicating a basement location and 00 for sub-basement. The practice of identifying buildings by number is a long-standing tradition at MIT. Although sometimes ridiculed as evidence of an "engineering mindset", referred to as "a system that disorients outsiders", this system is somewhat logical, allows members of the MIT community to locate a room they may never have seen before; this numbering system contrasts with the building identification at other nearby colleges. For example, at Harvard University, knowing the location of "Maxwell-Dworkin" will not help in locating "Claverson" or "Larsen"—no matter how many years of experience one may have, one either knows these locations or has no idea where they may be.
Under the MIT numbering scheme, community members will know where Building NW95 must be if they have never been near there. Most MIT buildings do have names, which can be found on many maps, or carved near the entrance, molded into a bronze plaque, or lettered onto a glass window. Many buildings are popularly known by name as individual rooms are identified by number; some locations have dual designations in common use. Building names can be obtained from either the interactive online or downloadable MIT map. There are numerous minor refinements and exceptions in the room numbering and naming, providing plenty of material for a trivia contest, or for sussing out would-be impostors; the student-written MIT guide, How To Get Around MIT devotes 4 pages of small print to details of MIT geography. Boston's Back Bay neighborhood was recovered from filled-in marshland along the Charles River over several decades; the City of Boston reserved several lots for churches and other community buildings. A lot bounded on the north and south by Newbury and Boylston streets, to the east and west by Berkeley and Clarendon streets, was awarded to the Boston Society of Natural History and to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
William G. Preston designed three buildings to occupy the site, although the original plan for an "MIT Museum" was never built; the Natural History Society building, completed in 1862, occupied the easternmost third, facing Berkeley Street. The MIT building called the Rogers Building, occupied the center and faced Boylston Street; the building was not opened until 1865 owing to delays because of the Civil War. The five-story Rogers building featured a "grand tetra-style Corinthian portico" modeled on the Duke of Wellington's remodeled Apsley House. MIT outgrew this space as new schools and laboratories were founded. In 1886, the five-story (o
California
California is a state in the Pacific Region of the United States. With 39.6 million residents, California is the most populous U. S. the third-largest by area. The state capital is Sacramento; the Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second and fifth most populous urban regions, with 18.7 million and 9.7 million residents respectively. Los Angeles is California's most populous city, the country's second most populous, after New York City. California has the nation's most populous county, Los Angeles County, its largest county by area, San Bernardino County; the City and County of San Francisco is both the country's second-most densely populated major city after New York City and the fifth-most densely populated county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. California's $3.0 trillion economy is larger than that of any other state, larger than those of Texas and Florida combined, the largest sub-national economy in the world. If it were a country, California would be the 5th largest economy in the world, the 36th most populous as of 2017.
The Greater Los Angeles Area and the San Francisco Bay Area are the nation's second- and third-largest urban economies, after the New York metropolitan area. The San Francisco Bay Area PSA had the nation's highest GDP per capita in 2017 among large PSAs, is home to three of the world's ten largest companies by market capitalization and four of the world's ten richest people. California is considered a global trendsetter in popular culture, innovation and politics, it is considered the origin of the American film industry, the hippie counterculture, fast food, the Internet, the personal computer, among others. The San Francisco Bay Area and the Greater Los Angeles Area are seen as global centers of the technology and entertainment industries, respectively. California has a diverse economy: 58% of the state's economy is centered on finance, real estate services and professional, scientific and technical business services. Although it accounts for only 1.5% of the state's economy, California's agriculture industry has the highest output of any U.
S. state. California is bordered by Oregon to the north and Arizona to the east, the Mexican state of Baja California to the south; the state's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, from the redwood–Douglas fir forests in the northwest to the Mojave Desert in the southeast. The Central Valley, a major agricultural area, dominates the state's center. Although California is well-known for its warm Mediterranean climate, the large size of the state results in climates that vary from moist temperate rainforest in the north to arid desert in the interior, as well as snowy alpine in the mountains. Over time and wildfires have become more pervasive features. What is now California was first settled by various Native Californian tribes before being explored by a number of European expeditions during the 16th and 17th centuries; the Spanish Empire claimed it as part of Alta California in their New Spain colony. The area became a part of Mexico in 1821 following its successful war for independence but was ceded to the United States in 1848 after the Mexican–American War.
The western portion of Alta California was organized and admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850. The California Gold Rush starting in 1848 led to dramatic social and demographic changes, with large-scale emigration from the east and abroad with an accompanying economic boom; the word California referred to the Baja California Peninsula of Mexico. The name derived from the mythical island California in the fictional story of Queen Calafia, as recorded in a 1510 work The Adventures of Esplandián by Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo; this work was the fifth in a popular Spanish chivalric romance series that began with Amadis de Gaula. Queen Calafia's kingdom was said to be a remote land rich in gold and pearls, inhabited by beautiful black women who wore gold armor and lived like Amazons, as well as griffins and other strange beasts. In the fictional paradise, the ruler Queen Calafia fought alongside Muslims and her name may have been chosen to echo the title of a Muslim leader, the Caliph. It's possible.
Know ye that at the right hand of the Indies there is an island called California close to that part of the Terrestrial Paradise, inhabited by black women without a single man among them, they lived in the manner of Amazons. They were robust of body with great virtue; the island itself is one of the wildest in the world on account of the craggy rocks. Shortened forms of the state's name include CA, Cal. Calif. and US-CA. Settled by successive waves of arrivals during the last 10,000 years, California was one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse areas in pre-Columbian North America. Various estimates of the native population range from 100,000 to 300,000; the Indigenous peoples of California included more than 70 distinct groups of Native Americans, ranging from large, settled populations living on the coast to groups in the interior. California groups were diverse in their political organization with bands, villages, on the resource-rich coasts, large chiefdoms, such as the Chumash and Salinan.
Trade, intermarriage a
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