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 Credits Root

Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods and Historiography

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Visual  |  Interpretive  |  Institutional |  Spatial  |  Quantitative  |  Narrative  |  Digital  | Publications | Historical Scholarship |  Film and Media Studies  |  

All human action takes and makes place. 
The past is the set of all places made by human action.
History is a map of those places.Note

Form ever follows function.Note

This multimodal book presents a spatial and visual hybrid of social science and humanities approaches to the study of the past.

In cultural and media studies I am part of an embodied realist school; in political science and sociology I am a historical institutionalist, but my heaviest debt is to Georg Simmel, himself sui generis; in philosophy my allegiance runs along paths of aporetic thinkers (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein), and especially through the phenomenologists, existentialists, and early pragmatists; in geography and history it would be hard to classify my approach according to any existing school.  In the present work I attempt to demonstrate that history is geographical, that the past is a vast topography of places: topoi, and every topos has two principal dimensions: those of metaphoric and geometric spatiality.  All temporality is a function of motion, or an emotion of motion, and all places/topoi are intersections in the currents of motion.  Geophysical place-making is inscription of institutions into the landscape, which accumulate to produce regional differences.  From these principles it is possible to map the past with new levels of interpretive understanding (humanistic inquiry) and relatively objective explanations (analytic inquiry).

Deep discussions of that author's many theoretical and methodological positions are presented here by topic: Visual  |  Interpretive  |  Institutional |  Spatial  |  Quantitative  |  Narrative  |  Digital  | Publications | Historical Scholarship.
 

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  1. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from the Clovis to Nixon Phil Ethington