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.
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 V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
Regime IX: U.S./Global Networked Neoliberal (1992-Present)
2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
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
Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space
3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
“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
4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Ahn Chang-ho and Philip Ahn
White Shadows in the South Seas
Dolores del Río and Maria Rovitz Ramos
Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Sympathy for the Devil
The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010
6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000
Geopolitical Economy of Whiteness 1940-1990
The Political Geography of Race, 1940s-1990s
.
