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

Los Angeles Since 13,000

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Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since the earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print, online and public art formats.

Ghost Metropolis aspires to make the past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. 

Ghost Metropolis follows several textual models:  Livy's history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (53 BCE); Plutarch's Lives (c. 100 CE); (Cervantes's Don Quijote (1601-15); Shakespeare's Richard III (1595), Macbeth (1605), and Midsummer Night's Dream (1604); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949).

Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “Atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography.

Ghost Metropolis has a structure inspired by Don Quijote and Moby-Dick:  It is a single story of a unique entity, but that entity--Los Angeles--like the characters Don Quijote de la Mancha, Ahab, the White Whale, or Hamlet, is so complex, tragic, comic, and historical, that it will require many stories, many viewpoints, many voices, many idioms and genres, even to approach it.

Los Angeles, a great world metropolis of the human race, is and has been both a living environment and many millions of persons, each of whom has a right to a history, tragedy, or comedy on the scale of Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, Ahab, Queequg, Dagoo, Richard Duke of York, Macbeth, or Puck.

Both Cervantes and Melville composed their masterworks with a coherent through-line, which weaves through the digressions and tangents and interruptions of free-standing essays, novellas, and parodies of genre, filled with reflective narratives within narratives.  Each work provides multiple paths toward the same goal--to understand an enigmatic whole.

Ghost Metropolis is composed of narrative paths: textual, photographic, cinematic, and cartographic.  A Reader's Guide explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths weblike network intersections. 

beginning as simply as choosing one of the pathways in this mental map of Ghost Metropolis. 

Readers are encouraged to spend a few minutes with the Reader's Guide, which explains how the work is organized by essays,  photographs, video, graphics, maps, and photomontages.  I

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