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 and online formats. It aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. The ghostly presence of the actions of previous generations haunts the global landscapes of this metropolis. The inscribed footprints of every action, good, bad, heroic, tragic, mundane, accumulate as the region ages, so that every subsequent generation owes an enormous debt to the past. Those generations inscribed our landscape. The coral-like structures left us are the skeletons of both the best and worst: the creative, humane, positive, just actions have saved the metropolis, but it is scarred by the unhealed wounds left by cruel, selfish, and bloody acts of injustice that remain all around us, shaping the patterns, quality, and meaning of our lives. Injustices that go have escaped accountability poison the soil for future generations, so a necessary task toward achieving a just and humane global metropolitan community is to exorcise the demons of our past and also pacify the unquiet spirits of those who endured tyranny and exploitation. Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who welcomed the first humans to settle the Los Angeles Basin, and was in turn destroyed by them, is the appropriate totem of the Avenging Angel in El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels.

Ghost Metropolis seeks to make those ghosts visible, readable, knowable, and therefore actionable. Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, for accountability and for the sheer pleasure of reading stories and seeing through time using the time-machines of cartography, photography, and narrative.

This work follows several 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 (1592), Macbeth (c. 1605); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949).  Equally a visual work, 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.   The lineage of this work is also photographic, and cinematic.  It draws all previous visual traditions together, understandably, because it is also a product of the digital age, a multimedia work of interactive storytelling and argumentation.

Pictorial representations of social forms can be thought of as the mapping of the footprints of past actions. Past actors inscribed and left the scene. Their inscribed actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant as ghosts, shaping lives invisibly. The historian who maps the past makes these ghosts visible. If the past is the landscape of what took place, then writing history, as representing, recounting, narrating the paths of our ancestors in that landscape, is inherently cartographic. Ghost Metropolis, as a work of visualization, owes its deepest debt to the Rennaisaance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau.  My own Ghost Maps extensions of this tradition.

What does it mean, to be "inspired" by these ancient, centuries-old, and contemporary models?   I seek to emulate Livy in telling the story of an imperial metropolis over many centuries.  Plutarch's systematic biographies are unafraid to judge rulers morally, while telling thrilling stories. From Cervantes I learned that a single, vastly complex phenomenon, like Don Quijote or Los Angeles, requires many stories, many viewpoints, many voices, many genres, and idioms, even to approach it.  It requires Irony, satire, parody, and also grim determination and hope. Melville also wrote in the tradition of Cervantes, but Moby-Dick is a model for Ghost Metropolis also because it is a reflection on power and justice in the United States of America, its component regions, and its global reach.  It is the story of a multicultural nation on the march, with rulers and ruled, owners and workers.  A historian and political scientist with many clear ideas about the theoretical basis of every story, I have composed Ghost Metropolis with a political theory that owes the most to Shakespeare, in part because I also hold that the theory of politics evident in his work lived on in North America, informing its political culture.  Finally, Fernand Braudel's masterwork, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II is a model in many respects.  Braudel's history is that of a region that is the product of processes, actions, and events that must be studied on several scales of time and geography.  It is also a representative work of the Annales school method of mobilizing every available intellectual discipline, from the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, to accomplish the job of telling a comprehensive history of a region on and within the globe.

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

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