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 labor in motion.

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 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.  The Los Angeles metropolis developed a set of traits that resulted in a militant, warlike, and internally authoritarian metropolis, maintaining and reproducing a racial apartheid.

When Los Angeles suddenly grew to massive productivity, population and power in the 20th century, 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, mass media, apartheid social geography--opposed and rebelled against by movements for freedom and equality, came together in its 9th 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.

Because Los Angeles is a megacity, with more than 16 million living residents, a world-spanning immigrant population of enormous cultural diversity, any general history of Los Angeles must necessarily have limits. Trying to account for everything in an inherently global metropolis would be tantamount to writing a history of the entire human world. This work is large and does ambitiously cover a very wide range of topics, from mass culture to world wars.  And it covers an extremely long period of time, since first human habitation.  But Ghost Metropolis is not encyclopedic.  Ghost Metropolis maps, narrates, visualizes, interprets, and explains the specific acts and processes by which the people of Los Angeles created a region through successive regimes of power, and how they built a metropolis that briefly ruled the world through its military industrial and mass media institutions and leaders in the age Angeleno presidents Nixon and Reagan.  It tells just as many stories as its author deemed necessary to trace the historical roots of the region's distinct contributions to world history in recent times.

Contents of this path:

  1. Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century
  2. Paths and Places of Los Angeles: 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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