Notes on California as an Island: There’s truth in old maps

This article considers California as an island, as a place apart. In five fragments, it looks at the state as a place where ideas are exchanged, imported and exported; as a place whose economy, geography and politics keep it apart from the rest of the country; as islands within islands; as a place that early cartographers and explorers believed to literally be an island; and as a place of ecological richness rivaling mythical islands.