Cycles of Drought and Flood

“And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and when the wet years returned, they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”

—John Steinbeck, East of Eden

Alongside its promise of idyllic weather, California delivers cycles of floods and droughts. Our climate history demonstrates stretches of drought interspersed with heavy—and sometimes catastrophic—rains.

As our state struggles through a five-year drought and an El Nino winter, we find ourselves in the seemingly paradoxical period of simultaneous flooding and drought. And, as B. Lynn Ingram and Frances Malamud-Roam write in The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow, “Climatologists now speak in terms of even deeper droughts, and larger and more frequent floods, for the future.”

Two images in the California Historical Society’s collection exemplify these two climatic events.

Yes, Virginia, We Have Another Election Coming Up

First Women to Vote in California, 1912; California Historical Society, CHS2011.559

After a long battle, California finally granted women the right to vote in state elections in October 1911. In this photograph, three of the first women in the state to vote cast their ballots at a poll booth in March 1912. It was not until 1920, with the ratification of the 19th Amendment, that the national fight for women’s suffrage ended. Even then, women were slow to acquire the voting habit, taking about 60 years to equal or exceed the number of male voters casting ballots, according to the Pew Research.   

By Steve Swatt

Voters in many parts of California face another Election Day on November 3 that few are aware of and in which even fewer will participate. We won’t be electing a president or governor, but voters throughout California will be deciding local, nonpartisan issues—such as mayor and sheriff in San Francisco, school board members in Palos Verdes and El Segundo, and local taxes in Hermosa Beach and South Pasadena.