California missions
Franciscan colonial settlements
The California missions were a chain of 21 Spanish religious outposts established along the California coast from 1769 to 1833, built to convert Native Americans to Christianity and extend Spanish colonial control.
Today the missions function as museums and tourist attractions, and studying them is a staple of California elementary school curriculum: Every fourth-grader in California builds a mission model.
- adobeSun-dried clay bricks
- neophytesInexperienced newcomers
- El Camino RealColonial Spanish road network
- Spanish EmpireHistorical Iberian colonial power
- secularizationReligion losing social significance
evangelization · oral histories · Catholicism · quadrangles · colonialism · bell towers · heritage tourism · cultural assimilation · adobe construction · chapels · courtyards · historical preservation · friars · padres · whitewashed · red tile roofs · agricultural practices · grape vines
- American Catholicismarchdiocese, parish council, archdioceses, Catholic school, Catholic schools
- Catholic missionsmissionary work, Jesuits, Franciscans, Dominicans, evangelization
- Christian missionsmissionary work, missionary societies, church planting, evangelists, Christianization
- missionsmissionary work, missionary, church planting, missionary societies, apostle
- FranciscansSaint Francis, friars, St. Francis, friar, Francis of Assisi
- American HistoryAmerican Revolution, Revolutionary War, colonial era, founding fathers, Declaration of Independence
California missionsmilitary forts
Defensive armed installations
trading posts · haciendas · pueblos · mining camps · colonial plantations
California missionstribal autonomy
Native groups' self-governance rights
decolonization · indigenous sovereignty · Native American reservations
California missionsCalifornia Gold Rush
Mid-century mining frenzy westward
Sutter's Mill · Gold Rush · Silicon Valley · forty-niners · Hollywood