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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

Narratives

677

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. 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 Pathways

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.

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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 about | narratives | genres | methods | 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. Historians make the ghosts of the past visible. Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, not merely for the sheer pleasure of reading narratives in text, cartography, photography, and video, but ultimately for the goal of accountability. The blood of countless generations stains the streets of Los Angeles. Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of The Angels 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
about   |  narratives |  genres | methods  | credits

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 is a large, multidimensional work about a very large and very old region. It is composed of hundreds of elemental textual and visual units in multiple genres. The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself.

Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of mapping. Those three dimensions are:

1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors
2) the visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures
3) the cartographic: visualizing the topography of human action.

Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative.

Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present. It can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life. It can be read across subject areas, within the same chronological period. It can also be read via intersections and networks of tags, through and between the textual and visual narratives.

The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into six thematic narrative paths. Those with a Blue Link are ready for review, because they have a sufficient visual companion narrative built-out.

All essay drafts in their most up-to-date versions are accessible, via the Narrative Essays path.

Principal Narrative Paths (Path Titles in Bold)

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.

The location of each essay within these Narrative Paths is its "home position," because I wrote or revised most of them to belong to those series. But most Narrative Essays also belong to other paths or networks, reachable via numerous linkages within this weblike Scalar book.

The Narrative Essays that have have been woven together with a Visual Narrative can be reached via the Reviewer's Page.
Theory and Methods
about   |  narratives |  genres | methods  | credits

I have labored for years to sharpen tools that are versatile, powerful, and also, when needed, delicate and fine-tuned enough, to help us both know (saber) and to understand (conocer) so giant and diverse of an entity as the global metropolis of Los Angeles. While I deliberately wrote the narrative essays with a vocabulary of common English speech, the whole of this work is based on theoretical work I have conducted for more more than two decades, and most of that work is written in very technical language, specific to several disciplines. Ghost Metropolis is a historical work built with the tools of many disciplines, from the social sciences to the humanities, and so its theoretical framing is necessarily diverse: the theories underpinning the social sciences and the humanities, natural sciences and the latest emergent field of neuroscience, descend from very different intellectual genealogies. The discussion in the next two paragraphs summarizes very quickly the intellectual pathways I have taken and the basic premises of the work as a whole. I also offer far more detailed introductions to my theory and methods on pages specific to the several discourses involved, and each of these points to my publications that delve more deeply into the various questions involved: Visual | Interpretive | Institutional | Spatial | Quantitative | Narrative | Digital In the philosophies of knowledge, understanding, and cognition, I owe my greatest debts to the phenomenological, pragmatic, and existential traditions, beginning with Dilthey and James, through Simmel, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, Ricoeur, and Casey. But in philosophy, I also identify with the aporetic tradition, beginning with Aristotle, through Nietzsche, Simmel, and Wittgenstein. These philosophers did not seek to build "systems," like Hegel, but rather, chose to examine the world one puzzle (aporia)at a time. I am also very influenced by work in the cognitive neurosciences, from Schneewind to Lakoff, and have joined that with the emergent field of visual studies, and the much older field of art history. There my debts are to Erwin Panofsky and the acid criticism of Art Forum in the 1970s. I have participated, in real time, in the "spatial turn" sparked by Lefebvre and Foucault, Bachelard, Soja. In political science, I have long identified with the historical institutionalists, especially the work of Theda Skocpol.   underlying my whole endeavour has been a desire to emulate Fernand Braudel's great masterpiece of interdiscinplinary history and regional geography, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949).    Putting these various disciplines together has been my ongoing theoretical and methodological project during the fourteen or so years that I have labored to produce Ghost Metropolis. Indeed, I have been driven to invent theoretical tools and methods to apply those tools, or else goals of the research program would not have been reachable. The intersection of all these philosophical and theoretical an ddisciplinary paths can be summed up in a paean to the embodied individual, whose understanding of the world and intentions for action are inseparably "grounded" in that persons' position and place. The intersection of my theoretical and methodological "groundwork" is also the region: 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. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. This brings me from the realm of underlying theories to the outward presentation of the work, its expression in the multi-genre (multimedia) form that you, the reader, are engaging now.
Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives. As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published, and some were conducted with collaborators, who are copiously acknowledged in each portion of Ghost Metropolis that resulted from collaborative work with others. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.    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 many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos.

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