19th Century

SAN DIEGO - In the ocean off Coronado, a Navy team has discovered a relic worthy of display in a military museum: a torpedo of the kind deployed in the late 19th century, considered a technological marvel in its day. But don't look for the primary discoverers to get a promotion or an invitation to meet the admirals at the Pentagon - although they might get an extra fish for dinner or maybe a pat on the snout. The so-called Howell torpedo was discovered by bottlenose dolphins being trained by the Navy to find undersea objects, including mines, that not even billion-dollar technology can detect.

SAN DIEGO - In the ocean off Coronado, a Navy team has discovered a relic worthy of display in a military museum: a torpedo of the kind deployed in the late 19th century, considered a technological marvel in its day. But don't look for the primary discoverers to get a promotion or an invitation to meet the admirals at the Pentagon - although they might get an extra fish for dinner or maybe a pat on the snout. The so-called Howell torpedo was discovered by bottlenose dolphins being trained by the Navy to find undersea objects, including mines, that not even billion-dollar technology can detect.

The yellowing government survey map of San Nicolas Island dated from 1879, but it was quite clear: There was a big black dot on the southwest coast and, next to it, the words "Indian Cave. " For more than 20 years, Navy archaeologist Steve Schwartz searched for that cave. It was believed to be home to the island's most famous inhabitant, a Native American woman who survived on the island for 18 years, abandoned and alone, and became the inspiration for "Island of the Blue Dolphins," one of the 20th century's most popular novels for young readers.

A glittering modern media school is being erected at USC in a building carefully designed to resemble a stately 19th century college edifice. The new five-story home for the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism will be made of steel and concrete but swathed in a brick veneer intended to evoke the historic halls many Americans associate with academia. Known as Collegiate Gothic, the architecture style inspired by medieval churches dates to the 1870s in the U.S. with the appearance of two Gothic-inspired halls at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn.

An exhibition by 19th century English photographer Eadweard Muybridge will open next week at the Orange County Museum of Art. Muybridge, who died in 1904 at age 74, is most famous for his groundbreaking photographic series of running horses, people and other subjects that revealed the anatomy of bodies in motion.

As crowds of Parisians line up every day to enter the Museum D'Orsay, the new museum has already been hailed by French television and newspapers as one of the great art museums of Paris. But its collections will probably surprise and perhaps even confuse foreign visitors. The museum opened its doors to the public for the first time on Dec. 9.

Has the family dog ever requested some home cooking? How about a home-cooked dog biscuit? No kidding. Such delicious and interesting recipes dating back to the 19th century can be found in a 218-page cookbook the First Congregational Church of Buena Park sells for $10, said Nancy Sutton, the church's secretary. Additional recipes include the Knott's Berry Farm boysenberry pie and Delmonico's lyonnaise potatoes, a New York treat from 1888. Recipes for diabetics are also featured.

California has had 27 chief justices of the state Supreme Court -- and perhaps one of them should have spent more time in prison than on the bench. In the 19th century, California was not just a place of casual violence; it was the site of more fatal duels than anyplace else in the nation. In one of them, the state's chief justice killed a U.S. senator. David Smith Terry didn't exactly come to the bench with a judicial temperament.

The cheval glass was an important piece of bedroom furniture in past centuries. By the 1700s, large sheets of glass could be made and silvered. A cheval is a large mirror on a stand. The mirror can be swiveled to enable the viewer to see shoes and hat--a practical dressing mirror. The word "cheval" comes from the French word for horse, but the only similarity between the mirror and a horse is that each has four legs. Bedrooms in past centuries rarely had full-length mirrors.

Old-fashioned games--the kind that don't need electricity or batteries--will be part of the fun at Sunday's second annual Victorian Family Picnic at Rancho Los Cerritos, 4600 Virginia Road, Long Beach. On the back lawn of the rancho, kids can try their skills at ring tossing, croquet, sack races, hoop rolling and walking on stilts.

Under the watchful eye of a librarian at the Huntington, Paul Bryan Gray gently turns the delicate pages of an 1855 edition of El Clamor Público , Los Angeles' first newspaper published entirely in Spanish. These bound volumes are like old friends for Gray, who spent two years reading every line during more than a decade of work on his new book "A Clamor for Equality," a biography of El Clamor 's remarkable 18-year-old editor, Francisco P. Ramirez. "I was fascinated by this guy Ramirez," says Gray, 74. "He was a civil rights activist when people didn't talk about it. He was a community organizer before there was such a thing....

The first day for California lawmakers to introduce bills in the new two-year session was Dec. 3, the day they took their oaths. The Legislature then immediately recessed for the holidays and did not reconvene until this week, but through December the desk remained open for bills to be submitted, and there are now hundreds that will be scheduled for hearing, examined by the Legislative Analyst's Office, or quietly killed by Assembly or Senate leadership....

The tall ships dueling off the coast of Dana Point were only supposed to look like they were at war. But after the cannon aboard the tall ship Amazing Grace rumbled, the stinging pain that Donna Reed felt in her legs was quite real. "It was like a scene from 'The Exorcist,' " said Reed, her wounds still sore days later. "I started to bleed in several different areas. " She had been shot. So it went during what was supposed to be a climactic moment in the Ocean Institute's annual tall ships festival: the Saturday evening mock cannon fight that would simulate the spectacle of a historic battle on the high seas.

LOMPOC, Calif. - A new beef vendor at the Santa Monica farmers market, Rancho San Julian is very likely the oldest continuously operated family farm in California, dating to 1816, when José de la Guerra began to raise meat for the presidio at Santa Barbara. In 1837, the governor of Alta California granted him title to the ranch, which has remained in his family for nine generations. It currently extends over 13,000 acres of grasslands and oak forest, roamed by cougars, bears and hawks, and home to 500 Angus cows and their calves.

WASHINGTON - Constantino Brumidi came to the U.S. Capitol in the 1850s after emigrating from Italy, found its walls bare and worked until his dying day to adorn them with frescoes and friezes. "The art here doesn't sit idle on display every day. It summons the building to life and replenishes the soul of the Congress," House Speaker John A. Boehner(R-Ohio) said before he and other congressional leaders posthumously awarded Brumidi the Congressional Gold Medal. "This of course is the legacy of Brumidi, who filled his work with such color and attention to detail and tradition that it is unavoidable and too captivating to be ignored.

How was that little vacation you took? You remember. It cost you almost nothing, it burned some calories (or, after that ice cream cone, added a few) and briefly immersed you in quintessential California. It was that walk on a pier, those structures that stretch out like a gateway into the Pacific. Perhaps we don't think about them much, but they're part of what has made California California: Piers (or wharfs as they were called in the mid-19th century) once were the primary way of moving food, cargo and travelers on and off sailing vessels.

The little puppet who wanted to be a real boy, the Donkey-Man, Lampwick, Geppetto and all the characters in one of the most beloved stories in children's literature will come alive as Italy's noted children's theater company Teatro delle Briciole brings its fantasy production of "Pinocchio" to McCallum Theater in Palm Desert on Wednesday and to UCLA's Freud Playhouse on Saturday and Sunday.

USC's School of Medicine celebrates its 100th anniversary this year. Among the many bits of historical trivia being remembered--this one noted in the Los Angeles County Medical Women's Assn. Newsletter--is the fact that there were two women in the school's first class of 20, a respectable statistic for women in 1885. In addition, the fledgling school had a woman on its faculty of 12, the first woman medical school faculty member in California. Dr.

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Convert an area in Lower Manhattan into a comfortable, racially integrated middle-class neighborhood as the city's population swelled, largely through European immigration. Things didn't turn out so well, though: Before long, Five Points had become a crowded, diseased, heavily Irish slum, and even Charles Dickens, no stranger to urban squalor, was shocked by this "square of leprous houses ... reeking everywhere with dirt and filth," during a visit.

Howard Terpning paints how the West was lived and lost more than 120 years ago. His subject is 19th century Native Americans, although he is not their descendant. Some of his canvases aim to capture the courage, dignity and desperation of the fight to keep their land. Many are carefully detailed depictions of the ways of life they fought to save. "Tribute to the Plains People," now at the Autry National Center of the American West in Griffith Park, is the biggest solo show of Terpning's career - a retrospective that covers 35 years and documents his standing as the acknowledged leader of a popular but not universally admired movement in which paintings become time machines into the Old West.