Eleven More Events that Have Shaped Sacramento's Human Landscape

An earlier article in The California Geographer (Dilsaver, Wyckoff, and Preston 2000) identified fifteen historical events that triggered significant changes to California's human landscape. Building on that base, this article focuses on the four-county Sacramento region and adds eleven more events that have shaped its human landscape. The eleven events involve race-based slavery, the state capital, chain businesses, redevelopment, public higher education, the expanding medical sector, the U.S. immigration system, historic preservation, deindustrialization, restaurants, and human-driven drought. Each event has left its mark on places in the Sacramento area, as well as more widely across the state. Many of the events reveal important social and institutional, as well as economic and technological, aspects of Sacramento and California. These eleven events and the fifteen earlier identified reveal the multi-scalar and often conflicting values and forces that produce human landscapes and related spatial patterns.