A compact museum dedicated to California history, culture, and innovation, located in the Secretary of State building a block from the Capitol. The permanent exhibitions cover California's diverse communities — Native Californians, the Gold Rush, the labor movement, the Civil Rights era — with particular depth on the lives of people whose stories often get sidelined in the standard frontier narrative.
The rotating exhibitions tend to focus on California's cultural output: film, music, architecture, design. Smaller than the Crocker or the Railroad Museum, but the California Hall of Fame exhibition makes a worthwhile half-hour addition to a Capitol-area walking tour.