Review the Spanish and Mexican eras of California history and explain how the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred California to the United States in 1848.
This week reviews a long stretch of California history: Cabrillo's 1542 voyage, the 1769 founding of the mission chain, daily mission life and its honest costs, secularization in the 1830s, and the rise of the ranchos under Mexican rule. Now the story moves one step further, completing the bridge to the unit ahead. In June 1846, a small group of American settlers in Sonoma declared a short-lived independent "California Republic," raising a homemade flag with a grizzly bear -- an event called the Bear Flag Revolt. Within weeks, the United States Army arrived, and the Bear Flag Revolt folded into a larger conflict already underway: the Mexican-American War (1846-1848).
The war ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed February 2, 1848, in which Mexico gave up California and other territory to the United States. Remarkably, gold had already been discovered in California just nine days earlier -- though almost nobody yet knew it. In less than eighty years, California had now belonged to Spain, then Mexico, then the United States, and its next chapter was about to begin with a rush unlike anything the territory had ever seen.
Mastery looks like: They can sequence Spain, Mexico, and the United States as California's three governments and explain the Bear Flag Revolt and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
Common stumbles: Losing track of the order of the three governments; not connecting the timing of the gold discovery to the treaty.