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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 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

Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars

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For countless millennia, oil lay deep in the Earth like a curse of great richness, a sinister gift to humankind: “manna from hell.” This seductive manna, the entombed remains of ancient living flora and fauna, fueled the fortunes of a few; the transportation revolution; the industrial productivity and warfare of the 20th century; and turned nation-states against one another. Los Angeles has been a mighty metropolis in this era of petroleum. The petroleum basis of social power was a major pillar of the autocratic, militaristic, anti-democratic political culture of Los Angeles, whose chief architects, their enterprises great and global, are traced in this series of narrative essays.

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Intro Page for Reviewers
Dear Reviewer: This page is a meta-introduction to Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000. The actual introductory page, and the pages that immediately link from it, should eventually suffice for most readers in its final form, but Ghost Metropolis is not yet in its final form. It is in a preliminary review form, using the web publishing platform Scalar. Portions of this work have been published or exhibited in many venues, but only in preparation for this final assembly of this 13,000-year history of a metropolitan region that shaped world history.

For the quickest and most direct look at how a typical finished narrative essay looks, see "Crossroads of the LA Metropolis."

NOTE: Click on the "Home" icon or the Title to return to the first page. The menu at the top of each page provides easy access to major starting points.

Because it is nearly unprecedented to submit a book-scale, research-based "monograph" as a multi-genre, multimedia web production by a historian who is also a photographer, cartographer, and co-creator of research software programs, I want the reviewers to read a few paragraphs of context.

Ghost Metropolis is a mixed-media production whose principal ingredients are: Text; Photography; Cartography. This is emphatically not an illustrated history. It is a textual history, a visual history, and a spatial history.

Ghost Metropolis is the culmination of a decade and a half of labor. I first launched this project while a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 1997, always intending it to be a hybrid of text, photography, and cartography. Over the ensuing years, I wrote more than forty (40) historical essays about Los Angeles on a vide variety of topics, and these are woven together here. I also produced hundreds of images and maps. Most of this work clustered around my investigations of major topics, which now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita), urban development (Inscribing Los Angeles) petroleum politics (Manna From Hell) Hollywood (White Shadows); the rise of Nixon (Richard 37th); and racial segregation (Segregated Diversity).

A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose. Except for a few essays written in a social science idiom, it is free of theoretical terms. 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. Click on "methods" at the top of any page to access detailed discussions of theory and methods on the wide range of approaches I used in creating this work.

Like other historians, I have labored countless hours in the archives and reading books and writing and re-writing theoretical, narrative and social scientific texts. Unlike most historians, I have also labored countless hours making maps and photographs. In cartography, those hours go into converting research into pictorial maps: analyzing the data and designing and producing the visualizations of human action in space and time, to persuade viewers, or to inform them, or just to recount what took place. More than fifty of my own thematic maps appear throughout Ghost Metropolis, plus a series of reference maps in a visually layered form that I have invented, called "ghost maps." I have also invented other tools for visualizing the complex metropolitan past, such as "Transections" and the "Isolation-Diversity Plot."

I also made hundreds of photographs and photomontages, working both with my own camera and with archival photographs. My photography does not provide illustration nor decoration to a textual argument. Photography, as I handle it in Ghost Metropolis, is an end in itself, a parallel genre to textuality. Photography is powerfully enhanced with companion text, but in principle it can stand on its own. Photography is an instrument for seeing, knowing, and portraying the past. As a photorealist, I do claim that photography enables us literally to see the past...differently but no more clearly than with textuality or cartography or any other tool. My strategy in Ghost Metropolis is to use as many tools as I can to make the almost-impossibly large and complex phenomenon of "Global Los Angeles" knowable and understandable and readable.

Thirdly, the platform in which Ghost Metropolis is now presented to you--Scalar--bears some introductory remarks. Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form. (Full disclosure: I am one of the PIs of the Mellon grants and one of developers of Scalar). Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways. It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels. Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers. But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper. It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar. All you need to do is follow your interests.

Navigating and reading Ghost Metropolis should be as easy as reading a newspaper. The "home" icon in the upper left will give you a pre-set menu of the major sections of the work. The sections that best represent the structure of the work as a whole are the "Narrative Paths." These are series of essays that are arranged in chronological order to tell a larger story about large topics. Each individual essay is "stand-alone," so curious readers can skip around in Ghost Metropolis all they wish. But all forty essays together tell a coherent story and a coherent thesis, which will become apparent to anyone who reads most of the work.

The best place to start for reviewers who wish to grasp the core "argument" of Ghost Metropolis is the set of essays in Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City). Modeled on Livy's history of Rome, this narrative path presents in distilled form the argument that is present in all the essays: that the distinctive qualities of a metropolitan region are cumulative products of many past generations, who inscribed their ruling institutions into the landscape. While I do cover a long period from the first human habitation, most of the essays in Ghost Metropolis are about the period after the U.S. conquest of 1846-8. The essays in Ab Urbe Condita provide an unbroken chronological narrative account from 13,000 years ago to the beginning of the 21st century. The other five narrative paths are also chronological, but cover different time ranges.

BELOW IS A COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS. ALL ESSAYS ARE IN GHOST METROPOLIS, BUT ONLY THOSE WITH LINKS HAVE THE COMPANION NARRATIVES BUILT OUT. Readers may access any of the essays, finished or not, via the Narrative Path pages.

1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).
Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)
Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)
Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)
Regime V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
   Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
   Regime VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)
Regime IX: U.S./Global Networked Neoliberal (1992-Present)

2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Inscribing the Boundaries of Power: The Production of Governing Spaces, 1781-2000
The Boom of the 1920s: Industrial and Residential Groundwork
From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Networks
Making Democratic Spaces: A Visual Geography of Southern California Architectural Moderism, 1900s-1960s
Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts
Love with Strangers: The Los Angeles Counterculture and the Birth of an Art Capital
Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill
Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space

3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Power
“Doheny El Cruel”: The Chihuahua Connection
Los Ángeles contra La Raza Cósmica: The Los Angeles Counterrevolution of the 1920s
Hell’s Angels: Air and Power in a Cinematic Metropolis
The Furies: Los Angeles Industrial Mass Killing In the Second Word War
   Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars

4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry
Ahn Chang-ho and Philip Ahn
White Shadows in the South Seas
Dolores del Río and Maria Rovitz Ramos
Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
Tarzana of the Apes
Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood’s White Hunters
Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City

5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994
Sympathy for the Devil
The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010

6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000
Geopolitical Economy of Whiteness 1940-1990
The Political Geography of Race, 1940s-1990s
The Spacetime Transection: Pico-Whittier, Lakewood-Rosemead, and Sepulveda Blvd.
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Preface
Ghost Metropolis is a mixed-media production that aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. Because the past is the landscape of what took place, Ghost Metropolis maps and visualizes at the same time that it narrates and analyzes the past. Its principal ingredients are text, photography, and cartography. It is a textual, visual history, and spatial history.

Ghost Metropolis is the culmination of a decade and a half of labor, initiated while I was fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 1997, with the ambitious goal of making the deep and complex past of a mighty global metropolis knowable, understandable, and visible. As an interdisciplinary historian in the tradition Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, I knew that such a task would require the tools of several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Over the ensuing years, I wrote more than forty historical essays about Los Angeles on a wide variety of topics. These were all intended to be woven together eventually, and that is what I have done here. I also produced hundreds of images and maps. Most of this work clustered around my investigations of major topics, which now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita); urban development (Inscribing Los Angeles); petroleum and military-industrial politics (Manna From Hell); Hollywood (White Shadows); the rise of Nixon (Richard 37th); and racial segregation (Segregated Diversity).

A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose. Except for a few essays written in a social science idiom, it is free of theoretical terms. Ghost Metropolis is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published throughout the project, as I have attempted to solve puzzles regarding the spatial and visual dimension of the human past. But those theoretical writings are "groundwork," while the present work is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely.

Because this a book-scale, research-based "monograph" presented as a multi-genre, multimedia web production by a historian who is also a photographer, cartographer, and co-creator of the online platform in which it is assembled, key features of this work merit a few prefatory remarks. This is a multimedia work for some very fundamental reasons. My strategy in Ghost Metropolis is to use as many tools as I can to make the almost-impossibly large and complex phenomenon of "Global Los Angeles" knowable and understandable and readable.

First, this is emphatically not an illustrated history. I have developed and carefully sharpened tools for investigating and representing the past not only textually, but visually. Why? Any region, or any metropolis, is a massive spatial configuration of human relations. As we have learned from Henri Lefebvre and others, people not only live in spaces: they produce the places and spaces that are essential to the structuring, organization, rights, freedoms, and privileges of societies. This inescapable spatiality can be mapped and visualized, as one means toward historical knowledge and understanding. So, unlike most historians, in addition to researching in textual sources and writing textual accounts, I have also devoted a great deal of energy toward converting research into pictorial maps: analyzing the data and designing and producing the visualizations of human action in space and time, to persuade viewers, or to inform them, or just to recount what took place. More than fifty of my own thematic maps appear throughout Ghost Metropolis, plus a series of reference maps in a visually layered form that I have invented, called "ghost maps." I have also invented other tools for visualizing the complex metropolitan past, such as "Transections" and the "Isolation-Diversity Plot."

If spatial analysis and representation is a mode of research and argumentation parallel to textual modes, so too is photography. Photography is an instrument for seeing, knowing, and portraying the past. As a photorealist, I claim that photography enables us literally to see the past: no more clearly or reliably than with textuality or cartography or any other tool, but differently, and in its own way, powerfully. My photography does not provide illustration nor decoration to a textual argument. Photography, as I handle it in Ghost Metropolis, is an end in itself, a parallel genre to textuality. Photography is greatly enriched with companion text, but in principle it can stand on its own. These three modes or channels of communication are synergistic: they complement and reinforce one another. I have intentionally set them into interaction with one another, which is why text and images are woven together in the visually completed essays.

Thirdly, the platform in which Ghost Metropolis is now presented to you--Scalar--bears some introductory remarks. Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form. (I am co-PI of this project). Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways. It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels. Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers or, well, websites. But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper. It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar. All you need to do is follow your interests.

Ghost Metropolis is not yet in its final form. It is in a preliminary review form. It is nearly without any design customization at this point, in order for referees to focus fully on its content. Later, if accepted for publication, the design team of that press and myself will decide how much design work to add to the current "defaults" of the Scalar platform. This online edition is intended to be released simultaneously with a printed edition, which will be produced from, and contain a subset of the material in this online edition. The print form, which still needs to be edited and designed, should preserve the conceptual design of this online form. Portions of this work have been published or exhibited in many venues, all in preparation for this final assembly of this 13,000-year history of a metropolitan region that shaped world history. This presentation in Scalar is intended to be the final iteration, capping several design cycles I have been through, to conceptualize a form of presentation that optimizes the readability of such a large volume of diverse materials all dedicated to a common goal. Not all of the essays, however have been fully built-out with their visual companions.

A representative look at a typical finished narrative can be reviewed with the essay "Crossroads of the LA Metropolis."

BELOW IS A COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS. ALL ESSAYS ARE IN GHOST METROPOLIS, BUT ONLY THOSE WITH LINKS IN THE TABLE BELOW HAVE THE COMPANION VISUAL NARRATIVES BUILT OUT. Readers may access any of the essays, finished or not, via the Narrative Path pages, but it is recommended to begin with the more completely visualized essays.

1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).
Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)
Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)
Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)
Regime V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
   Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
   Regime VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)
Regime IX: U.S./Global Networked Neoliberal (1992-Present)

2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Inscribing the Boundaries of Power: The Production of Governing Spaces, 1781-2000
The Boom of the 1920s: Industrial and Residential Groundwork
From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Network
   The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture, 1900-1950
Love with Strangers: The Los Angeles Counterculture and the Birth of an Art Capital
Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill
Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space

3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Power
“Doheny El Cruel”: The Chihuahua Connection
Los Ángeles contra La Raza Cósmica: The Los Angeles Counterrevolution of the 1920s
Hell’s Angels: Air and Power in a Cinematic Metropolis
The Furies: Los Angeles Industrial Mass Killing In the Second Word War
   Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars

4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry
Ahn Chang-ho and Philip Ahn
White Shadows in the South Seas
Dolores del Río and Maria Rovitz Ramos
Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
Tarzana of the Apes
Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood’s White Hunters
Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City

5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994
Sympathy for the Devil
The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010

6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000
Geopolitical Economy of Whiteness 1940-1990
The Political Geography of Race, 1940s-1990s
The Spacetime Transection: Pico-Whittier, Lakewood-Rosemead, and Sepulveda Blvd.
.
Narratives
Ghost Metropolis is a work of spatial and visual, as well as textual storytelling, so the structure of the work attempts to weave these kinds of narratives together.

The six principal narrative paths that structure Ghost Metropolis are:

Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
White Shadows: The Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Richard 37th: The Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Segregated Diversity: The Geopolitical Economy of Racial Landscapes

Narratives are paths with implicit spatiality: we travel paths and these journeys are the grounding for storytelling. Mapping the past alone does not convey the meaning of that which has been mapped, nor the contribution of each topos to the grand ensemble of a global metropolis. Narratives do that, linking events and action that made the region what it is.

Narratives are stories told sequentially, but they are not always verbal-textual. Stories were spatial before they were verbal, and every journey of humanity--highly adapted with binocular vision and powerful visual neural processing--has been a visual journey.

There are many ways to narrate. Ghost Metropolis presents these three main types:

--Narrative Essays (in Narrative Paths)
--Visual Narratives
--Spatial Narratives Narrative Essays Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty (40) short "narrative essays," each averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past. Narrative Paths The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation.

This page references:

Oil Derrick, Signal Hill, 1929