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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 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

Narrative Paths

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There are far too many stories to tell about the global past of Los Angeles for any one historian to address, so I tell as many as I can, and these reflect my judgement about what stories are worth reading,and which are within my power to relate. Read these in any order that you wish, remembering that every Essay included in the following narrative pathways can stand alone, and many are included in several collections of narrative pathways.

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Networks Phil Ethington
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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 Phil Ethington
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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 about | narrative paths | intersections | credits 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. Past actors inscribed their labors into the landscape and left the scene; their 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 presence of the past is the inscribed form of human labor projected beyond the deaths of previous generations, haunting every global landscape. 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. Please visit the Reader's Guide, which explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths and the 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 may endure for a metropolis that promotes the human rights of all.
Reader's Guide Ghost Metropolis is a hybrid work composed of multiple genres designed to follow narrative pathways, and geospatial and visual forms of the past, structured along networks of intersections, both geometric and metaphoric. Because all human action takes and makes place, the object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven textual and visual genres together, ensemble. Form of Ghost Metropolis Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and several hundred of photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos. 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-two (42) short "narrative essays," averaging 12 typewritten pages, these narrative essays are much shorter than a traditional book "chapter." These are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne, they are literally essais,tries or attempts, to solve a particular problem. While they are mostly story in form, each also analyzes the sources of action and the relative responsibility of different actors, to arrive at an accountability for that cross-section of the historical world. Narrative Pathways The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presesnted 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. Visual Genres Photographs Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Photographic Narratives Semantic-photographic stories. -Curated sequences of static images. Panoramas Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position, forming a circle of varying wide-angle degrees, to a maxium of 360˚. Montages/Photomontages Assemblages of photographs and graphic arts, including cartography. Maps Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, maps usually carry semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development. Cartographic Narratives Curated sequences of maps. Video All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment designed to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind. Cinematic Narratives -Curated sequences of film stills or clips taken directly from cinematic sources. Does not include “production stills” taken by still camera equipment during the making of movies. Cinematic narratives are only taken from motion photography—in whatever format, film to digital. Audio -All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind.