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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present

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These stories tell a tale about a mighty metropolis that grew over many centuries to shape the course of human history. Such a tale entails many stories, told on many scales of time and space, about the Southern California land and its ecology; about the societies, cultures, and regimes, from Chumash and Tongva to Spanish, Mexican, and United States, who have inscribed the deeds that made Los Angeles into a powerful 21st-century metropolis of world cultures. These are stories told with words and images, from many viewpoints, drawn from many genres of knowledge.

The title of this tale, Ghost Metropolis, indicates that the past is ever present, all around us, shaping us. The actions of the past continuously branch out in the present of any age. While mostly invisible, the past is a real landscape of shapes and actions enabling our present. The ghostly past blends with the visible landscape that we now enact, inscribed by all the generations before us. Because every generation of a region learns to act within the social shapes of its inscribed pasts; each is the genuine descendant of previous generations, no matter how unrelated by blood.

As with all ancient regions, Los Angeles has accumulated its characteristics over the course of millennia, like a coral reef. The skeleton of its past supports its weight and supplies its shapes, while the living outer layer of the present extends those shapes into the future. Both material and metaphoric shapes accumulate: those we can see and touch, and those we can only see in the chronoscope of an historical account.

How did the metropolis called Los Angeles, and its region, come into being and acquire its characteristics? How did it come to export cultural and political power throughout North America and to the rest of the globe? Created by millions of global migrants, Los Angeles has become a major force worldwide, owing to its denizen's deeds and the way that they have competed for and exploited its valuable resources.

This historian-geographer attempts, in telling these stories, to make the landscapes of the deep and wide Los Angeles past visible. Ghost Metropolis seeks to map the diverse peoples of the region, and their inscription over thousands of years, the footprints of its key institutions: horticultural, agricultural, industrial, residential, mass media and visual arts, oil extraction, military-industrial, and political. Some stories are mainly "about" those institutions, as they make places and connections to other institutions and to other places on the globe. Other stories are mainly "about" the places, as they come into being, produced by institutions that intersect and flow through the region's specific locations.

Regions thrive on many time scales: from the very long durations of the climate, ecology, and civilizations, to the medium-scale durations of global trade, regimes, cycles of accumulation and human generations; to the shortest durations of events and the daily actions of individuals. While the largest scale is also the deepest historically, the "events" do not merely bob on the surface of deeper "forces." Those enacting events drive the entire regional complex by shaping the accumulated resources into every new future.

The ways that Los Angeles extended its power throughout the world reflects its upbringing over the centuries, across many places near and far. Mapping that upbringing involves tracing the course of human events across several spatial scales: from the global to the continental to the regional, local, neighborhood, and the site, and back again, from the site to the neighborhood, to the district, the city, the region, the continent, and the globe. The direction of action for Los Angeles is normally from the site outward to larger regions, because a global metropolis becomes so precisely bi shaping the world, rather than being shaped by it. Its denizens are net exporters of causation.

A region's pasts never stood still and will never come to rest. The persons who made Los Angeles in each generation were always in motion, migrating, circulating, living their private and public lives. All the while, they are also inscribing their deeds into the landscape. Mapping that moving past enables an understanding and explanation of the role of a metropolis on the world stage.

Every tale about any great metropolis must be selective, including some stories and excluding others. Ghost Metropolis attempts a very broad inclusion of thousands of people, places, and pasts. But it is neither comprehensive nor encyclopedic. It seeks to map the most distinctive features of the Los Angeles metropolis in the context of the world history that it came to shape.

Ghost Metropolis can be read as a single tale or as multiple, parallel narratives by theme, grouped as follows:

The Past as Landscape of Places

All happenings of the past took place, and made places. The oldest places of Los Angeles are the sites of its indigenous villages, which were the nodes of its ancient roads. The most recent places have been inscribed into many older ones. Over many centuries a myriad of places have blanketed the surface of the Los Angeles Basin.

How can so many pasts in so many places be told? Most shall never be told, because there are too many. Ghost Metropolis maps and narratives more than a thousand places, but those are only a small fraction of the places that comprise the region. The places chosen to include are those that are particularly representative of a metropolis's most vital characteristics. The stories in this section are about places of different scales and types, from historical ecology, to the pathways between and through its valleys, its rivers, and human settlements, which are very ancient and also very recent.

All places are the product of labor and landscape. “Los Angeles” is very large place made from many smaller places, each intricately interconnected with the others along network linkages that make the ensemble of the region. To tell stories of people’s deeds in the past is the same as telling the stories of the places those actions created. Stories in this section map the past in landmarks, neighborhoods, roads, highways, icons, intersections, boundaries, borderlands and routes.

Regimes of Power

Successive generations of rulers established the regimes that determined power and privilege in Los Angeles. Each regime left for the future the institutions they inscribed during its rule. Ten such regimes ruled the Los Angeles region: nine of them human., beginning with the Clovis hunters 13,000 years ago.

Each successive regime owed a great debt to its predecessors, who fixed, centuries earlier, the region's most fundamental relations: how land and wealth are distributed; how labor is controlled and rewarded; how groups are identified by race, religion, or gender, how they are endowed with or denied rights.

When human beings first set foot on the future site of Los Angeles, they found a region ruled already by truly ferocious giants. The top predator was the Short-Faced Bear (Arctodus simus), the largest carnivorous land mammal ever to live. To wrest control of the region, Clovis people wielded stone spearpoints on long lances to match the fangs and claws of Arctodus, plus those of the saber-toothed cat and the gigantic American Lion.

Humans fought these carnivorous giants for the prey they all prized: the giant mammoths and mastondonts, sloths, and glyptodonts. Such predator duels would have consecrated the City of Angels with the blood of humans and beasts together mingled.

The legendary battle of Clovis and Arctodus is no less fitting for Los Angeles than than is Rome's legend of the wolf-raised brothers Romulus and Remus, and the spilling of their fraternal blood on the central site of the Eternal City. Los Angeles is no less ancient. Its Lapis Negra is the bedrock of the Los Angeles River at Yaangna, El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles, Downtown Los Angeles.

Ruling the Los Angeles region has unfortunately entailed a great deal of violence. The elemental confrontation of 13,000 years ago, between Clovis and Arctodus dramatically marked the first transition from non-human to human rule.

With the next eight human-to-human rulership transitions, the new rulers sought control of Southern California's resources and the right to make the rules. The Clovis people were followed by the Hokan-Chumashan people, who established the region's geographic settlement patterns during their 9,000 years of rule. They were followed by the Tongva of the Uto-Aztecan invasion, who ruled the LA Basin for the next 2,500 years, ending in the 1780s, when the Spanish conquered with crosses and lances. Spanish rule was followed by Mexican rule from 1822-1848; followed by four distinct four successive regimes of the United States period.

Los Angeles reached the apogee of its world power during the Angeleno presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in from the 1960s to the 1980s. More than 13,000 years after the probable but legendary Battle of Clovis and Arctodus, Los Angeles scientists and industries built the Saturn-V rocket engines, the most powerful machines in all of human history, which put human beings on the Moon for the first time. The same LA missile industry built the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) which carry the U.S. arsenal of world-destroying nuclear weapons. The vast global metropolis of Los Angeles is now home to about 16 million persons from every language group on Earth.

The last, Tenth Regime period was inaugurated by the LA Uprising of 1992.

Over the course of these ten regimes, Los Angeles developed a set of traits that resulted in a militant, warlike, and internally authoritarian metropolis, maintaining and reproducing a racial apartheid. It created an anthropic ecology, dependent upon massive human inputs of imported fresh water, invasive species, air pollution, waste management, and species regulation.

When Los Angeles suddenly grew to massive productivity, population and power in the 20th century, it projected its regional institutions outward onto the nation and onto the globe. Its distinct assets in petroleum, motion pictures, aircraft and aerospace, combined with its autocratic rule, racist ideologies, mass media, apartheid social geography--opposed and rebelled against by movements for freedom and equality, came together in its Ninth Regime era: 1940-1992, when Presidents Nixon and Reagan led a grass-roots, mass-mediated populist movement nationwide. They brought LA's political culture to dominate the United States and exported it worldwide, escalating the Cold War in a carnography of power that exploded in the LA Uprising of 1992.

Media and Visual Cultures

The social, cultural, and political history of Los Angeles shaped the messages in the movies, radio, and television made there, and the mass media made in Los Angeles shaped the entire world.

Cultural production has been intrinsic to Los Angeles:in its internal formation and in its rise to global influence. Los Angeles arts and mass culture were forged in the furnace of a growing, multi-ethnic, migrant-stocked metropolis in the US-Mexican Borderlands and the Pacific Rim routes to Asia and South America. It was forged in--and contributed to--U.S. imperialism and revolutionary movements, and came to deadly world power in the propaganda of the 1930s and World War II. Combining its dual roles as capital of US mass media production and the capital of US aerospace production, Los Angeles became a pivot of global history in the Cold War, producing two world-historic presidents: the first capturing Washington with Angeleno militaristic and racial ideology; the second capturing the American mind with Angeleno media artifice.

These visual essays tell these stories and many more: of the role LA played in the recasting of the relations of men and women; its role in remaking the way human beings see, hear, think and feel; its role as a birthplace of "fascism" worldwide; its role in emancipating the human spirit and also in subverting the Enlightenment's deepest values of equality, democracy, and truth. Angelenos invented Hollywood's visual culture in the first half of the 20th century, a period of racial apartheid, political upheaval, and autocratic police departments. Tooled-up for propaganda, Hollywood projected its cultural power on the world in the years after World War II and minted the political culture of the post-Enlightenment world: a carnography of power.

Manna From Hell

For Clovis and all later Angelenos, the black pools of oil-tar at La Brea were the Mirror of Narcissus: a dark window into the city's ancient underworld. Vanity and hedonistic pleasure, utopian dreams, material abundance, all these entice the global migrant to Los Angeles. The reflection in the pools of La Brea is also a window onto the underworld of humanity. Oil's vast riches also bring out the will to power and flames of war. Oil is Manna from Hell: a rich and foul excrescence from the God Pluto. International struggle for oil dominated the 20th century, killing tens of millions in World Wars, Cold Wars and Terror Wars.

Oil production was the first globalizing industry of Los Angeles. While Chumash and Tongva had exploited petroleum tar for water craft construction and for fire, it was not until the 1890s that Angelenos began pumping it from the ground to fuel Second Industrial Revolution. Oil output from the region boomed again in the 1920s, anchoring a major part of global oil trade in Los Angels, especially with the career of Angeleno J. Paul Getty.

The 1880s-1930s was a tumultuous period of revolutionary upheaval, world war, and rapid industrial development which increasingly depended on oil. Struggles for that resource partially explain the coming of the Pacific War and fundamentally shaped the Second World War, just as Los Angels became central to world aircraft and warplane production. The vast reserves of oil beneath Los Angeles made its local industries possible.

The Los Angeles regional political culture took shape as the struggles of the period took place. Both the Mexican dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz (1874-1910) and the Mexican Revolution (1910-1929) came to and came from Los Angeles. The impact of Mexican politics on Los Angeles intensified after 1910, lasting until a wave of repression took hold in the mid-1920s. These were crucial years for the development of the Los Angeles regional political culture that eventually produced Nixon, Reagan, and the New Right in the 1950s-1980s. [WRAP THIS UP WITH THE MEDIA-INDUSTRIAL POST-ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE CARNOGRAPHY OF POWER. A FEW MORE SENTENCES TO MATCH THE LENGTH OF THE TOC.]

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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to the Age of Nixon and Reagan Phil Ethington
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