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 from Clovis to Nixon

677
Permit me to tell stories on scales from the personal to the global, about the Los Angeles metropolis: its place and places in human history. These are tales of utopian ambition and achievement, and also tales of inhumanity, exploitation, and the storage of injustice in the region's landscape, haunting it over many generations, generating world discord, climaxing in the LA Uprising of 1992.

Drawn by its many attractions, Angelenos over the centuries invented new ways of being human, from mass, hybrid culture to surfing and space flight.  Ghost Metropolis sings praises for the humane aspirations of millions of migrants who shaped the Los Angeles cityscape and eventually the fate of billions of people worldwide.  Stories of hope, irony, and comedy, of neighborhoods, art, invention, and utopian landscapes are abundant throughout these pages, but Ghost Metropolis also maps the accountability that Los Angeles deserves for a major share of the malevolent conditions facing the human world in the 21st-century present.

Stories and studies in this spatial, visual, and verbal hybrid work range in scale from the street level to the planetary level, and from the events of a day to those of a thousand generations. Ghost Metropolis maps the past, from the ground up, from the distant past to the pressing present. While wide-ranging, it is not encyclopedic.  It tells stories along many different lines toward the goal of explaining the reasons why, and how, Los Angeles shaped the present globe.  Chronologically, Ghost Metropolis begins with a handful of hunters who vanquished the fearsome saber-tooth cat, claiming the region as a human domain. It ends with the titanic global crisis of the late 20th century, a crisis generated in large part by two Angelenos--Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan--who rose from LA to dominate the most powerful nation on Earth.

Ghost Metropolis recounts the past of Los Angeles for a purpose.  It seeks to trace the shapes of, and accountability for, the three leading global problems of recent generations: racism, sexism, and fascism.  While Los Angeles was certainly not the sole origin, nor could it be solely accountable for these giant evils, it does bear a very large portion of responsibility for their form and function by the end of the 20th century.

Contents of this path:

  1. Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
  2. Places: Utopian Landscapes and the Intersections of Power
  3. Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
  4. White Shadows: Race, Erotics, Violence and Power of Global Hollywood
  5. Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century
  6. Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny
  7. The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century
  8. Bibliographies
  9. Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods and Historiography
  10. Phil Ethington, "The Humanities, the Digital, and Difference," keynote lecture for Studio Chi, DePaul University

This page is referenced by: