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 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. Past actors inscribed their labors into the landscape and left the scene, but their inscribed actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant, shaping later lives invisibly.   Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who ruled the region until conquered by the first humans, is the original demon haunting El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels.

The past is the landscape of what took place.  The historian who maps the past makes its ghosts visible.  Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, both for accountability and for the sheer pleasure of reading stories and seeing through time using the media of textual narrative, cartography, and photography.  Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of Los Angeles visible, readable, knowable, and therefore actionable.

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.  It owes a deep debt to the Renaissance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau.  My own Ghost Maps are extensions of this tradition.  This is also a work of the photographic and cinematic age.  Ghost Metropolis draws these previous textual and visual traditions together into a multimedia work of interactive storytelling and argumentation.

A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose, it is free of theoretical terms or jargon of any kind.  While it is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published elsewhere, it is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely. 

Reading and navigating Ghost Metropolis is very much like reading a newspaper.  Readers can start anywhere and follow their interests.  Ghost Metropolis is organized intuitively as a network of narratives.  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.

Preamble
Los Angeles, California, United States of America, is the heart of the Southern California region, a global metropolis so huge and complex that its weight in world history would be impossible to calculate. This graphic history attempts to tell its story, since the beginnings of the city as a permanent settlement. Los Angeles has devoured millions of immigrants, harbored millions of residents, birthed millions more. It breathes in and exhales tens of millions of visitors daily and yearly through its ports, airports, and highways. Its gargantuan human population--16.5 million in 2000--is drawn from all continents of the Earth. These teeming millions stand atop the shoulders of the many millions who preceded them as settlers and sojourners, each individual altering the region in some way, small or large.

These millions--since the age of Smilodon the sabre-toothed cat and the long-tusked Mammoths, through the Age of Aerospace, of which Los Angeles served as founding global capital--have been drawn to Los Angeles for the riches and freedoms and pleasures that it promises, and has promised, for thousands of years. Los Angeles has been the site of joy and beauty for many, but it has also been a deadly siren, devouring its lovers in chronic and spectacular paroxysms of repression and social violence. The ghosts of the injustices of the past haunt us in the form of institutions of unequal power etched into the landscapes all around us. Also surviving among these ghosts are the institutional beginnings of human rights, the echos to our ears and reflections to our eyes, emanating from past champions of justice. While Ghost Metropolis lies on the cynical side of historical appreciation, it also shines a
spotlight on those who have contributed creative spirit to the future triumph of peace and justice, so that hope my endure for a metropolis that promotes the human rights of all.

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