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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 Place in Global Geo-History, From the Pleistocene to the Present

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These stories tell a very tall tale about a mighty metropolis that grew, over many centuries, to shape the course of human history. Such a tale entails many stories, stories told on many scales of time and space; stories told with words and images; stories told about the land and its ecology; stories told about many realms of human endeavor; about the societies and cultures who have inscribed their deeds; stories told from many viewpoints, many genres of knowledge, evidence, and expression.

The title of this tall tale, Ghost Metropolis, indicates that the past is always with us in every present. The past is all around us, shaping us, an invisible landscape of shapes and actions that lead to the futures that we are now enacting. The ghostly past blends with the visible landscape and is attached to it, at many places. The shapes in our society are rooted in the shapes that have been inscribed into the landscape. Every past of the Los Angeles region, from the mammoth-predator ecology of the Pleistocene, through ten thousand years of continuous human settlement, is still present, still visible, still operable today.

Like all great and ancient regions, Los Angeles has accumulated its characteristics over the course of thousands of years. Much like an ancient coral reef: the skeleton of its past supports it and provides its general shapes. Both natural-material shapes and metaphoric shapes, of institutions, accumulate. This historian-geographer has attempted in these words and images to map the footprints of this region's past, centered on Los Angeles. How did this metropolis, and its region, come into being? Fernand Braudel showed, that regions are produced by many time scales: the ecology, the climate, the civilizations, global trade, and the local events within those civilizations at the scale of a single generation or individual.

Los Angeles, created by global migrants, has become a major force worldwide, owing to its people's deeds and the way that they exploited its vast reserves of valuable resources. Every present is haunted by its pasts. The ways that Los Angeles extended its power throughout the world reflects its upbringing over the centuries. The stories in Ghost Metropolis evoke its pasts as narrative maps to its distinctive, unique contributions to world history.

Soaring achievements, and also terrible crimes, are accountable to Los Angeles. The injustices of the past were inscribed, along with the institutions that made those actions possible, into the landscape, where they have lain for centuries, haunting later generations with the accumulation of inequality and inhumanity. Ghost Metropolis seeks to map the footprints of its key institutions: horticultural, agricultural, industrial, mass media and visual arts, residential, oil, and military-industrial.

The past of this place, this region of many places, is extremely deep. Time can be read downward through the natural and human landscape, as each generation builds atop the work of its predecessors.

The stories of Ghost Metropolis narrative and visualize Los Angeles, California, from its origins as a settlement on the peripheries of the globe, to its stature as a major source of world power by the 21st century. It tells how, across thousands of years, each generation of Angelenos has inscribed institutions, cultures, and built forms into the landscape of Southern California, making it a massive metropolitan region that shapes the lives of billions worldwide.

Los Angeles is today home to more than 16,000,000 people, from all parts of the Earth. The people who make each region are always in motion, migrating, circulating, living their private and public lives. All the while, they are also inscribing their deeds into the landscape. Every place is the product of a thousand previous places. Every metropolis is a unique combination of people, ecologies, places, and institutions. To tell the tale of any one metropolis, requires an account of that uniqueness, produced by its many pasts that have shaped its deep and intricate forms of power and possibility.

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 as it was produced by world history and as it has come to shape world history. It seems understanding and explanation of the rather large aspects of world history that flowed into and out of this region into the currents of global history.

Ghost Metropolis is a textual and visual map of the past. weaving many specific stories about the millions of people in thousands of generations who have inscribed the Los Angeles Basin with the cultures and economies and ruling regimes.

Region and regime are terms that both descend from the Latin regio, to rule. This series of essays narrates the inscription of human ruling institutions into the Los Angeles region. All power ultimately flows from a control over social relations within a specific territory, a landscape inscribed with the rules of the game of life: access to resources. Who decides who gets what and how? Who profits from the labor of others? Who were the few who controlled the fates of the many, and how often could the many control their own fates?

How did the interplay of power and freedom lift the fortunes of some and lead others to fall? Most of all, these essays trace the struggle for justice, freedom, and equality that leaves its haunting imprint in the landscape for all successive generations.

Places and Landscapes

The ecologies are "anthropic," a mix of natural and human organization, characterized now by the global geologic epoch of the Anthropocene. As metropolitans inhabit and work and play; as they rule the region and are ruled by its governing authorities, they inscribe institutions (all forms of organization and durable cultures) into the metropolitan landscape. All human action takes places and makes places: all social forms, relations of power, all products of labor, inscribe spatial shapes into the ecological landscape of Earth, with its organisms: boundaries, paths, nodes, relations, borderlands. A metropolis accumulates from these products of labor and landscape.

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 since the Clovis hunters arrived 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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Short-Faced Bear, 1,800,000 Years Ago to 11,600 Years Ago.