West Coast

The Pacific strip, settled late, from several directions at once, and consequently the least anchored to any single founding culture. Coastal California, Oregon and Washington were reached by sea and by trail rather than by continuous westward settlement, and the gold rush of 1849 brought three hundred thousand people from the eastern states, Mexico, Chile, China and Australia within a few years - a population with no shared background arriving simultaneously. New England merchants and missionaries supplied much of the early institutional layer, which is why the region's civic and educational instincts resemble Yankeedom, while its openness to reinvention does not. Asian immigration was substantial from the 1850s and repeatedly restricted, culminating in the exclusion acts and the wartime internment of Japanese Americans. The economy has run through timber, salmon, agriculture, aerospace, film and software, each remaking the place. Environmental politics, the initiative and referendum, and a series of social movements from the 1960s onward all have roots here. Housing costs are now the region's central political problem. Its universities are among the world's most productive. The region runs from Southern California to the Canadian border along the Pacific. It holds around fifty million people, most within a hundred kilometres of the ocean. The San Andreas fault and the Cascadia subduction zone both run through it. Coastal redwoods and giant sequoias grow nowhere else. It produces a large share of the country's fruit, vegetables and wine. Silicon Valley and Hollywood are both within it, and between them shape much of the world’s technology and culture.

• Existed: 1849 CE – present
• Type: Entity