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

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Ghost Metropolis maps the past of Los Angeles: 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.  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.

Every metropolis is a unique combination of people, places, and institutions.  The people are always in motion, migrating, circulating, living their private and public lives.  As they 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 on the ground: boundaries, paths, nodes, relations, borderlands.  A metropolis accumulates from these products of motion and labor.

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 since the most ancient times ruled the Los Angeles region.  Each successive regime owed a great debt to its predecessors, which had fixed, centuries ago, the region's most fundamental relations: how land and capital are distributed; how labor is controlled and rewarded; how groups are identified by race, religion, or gender, how they are endowed with rights or denied them. When Los Angeles suddenly grew to massive productivity, population and power, it began to project 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, and apartheid social geography, and movements for freedom and equality, came together in its 8th Regime era: 1940-1992, when Presidents Nixon and Reagan, powered by a grass-roots movement nationwide to bring LA's political culture to dominate the United States and exported it worldwide, in a Cold War climax that also concluded in the LA Uprising of 1992: the deadliest and most destructive urban uprising in U.S. history.

With a world-spanning influence and an immigrant population of enormous ethnic diversity, any general account of Los Angeles must necessarily have limits.  This work is large and ambitiously covers a very wide range of topics, from mass culture to world wars, but it is not encyclopedic, and does not attempt to be an encyclopedia.  Instead, Ghost Metropolis maps, narrates, visualizes, interprets, and explains the specific acts and processes by which the LA region came into being with its distinctive character: its people, places, products, and power.

Contents of this path:

  1. Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century
  2. Places: Blood, Boundaries, and Borderlands
  3. Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power
  4. Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power
  5. Topoi
  6. Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography
  7. Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes

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