Preface
New Para ***
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 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 Metropolisis 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, along with hundreds of maps and images,always intended as parts of a more complex whole--the completed work you are reading. This work is clustered along major topics, focusing on what I came to believe are the most distinctive features of the Los Angeles metropolitan region (vis-a-vis other global metropolises--each making their own distinctive contributions to world history). Those distinctive features include: a deep past characterized by autocraticv rule; a cultural hybridity and practice of invention that is represented Hollywood; the rise of the military-industrial complex around the leading-edge technologies of aeronautics and aerospace; petroleum as a central source of economic organization and power; and populist, grass-roots conservatism mobilized, ultimately, by two world-historic figures, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
These foci and all of the essays now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita); metropolitan development (Social Landscapes); petroleum and military-industrial politics (Manna From Hell); Hollywood (White Shadows); and race-ethnic segregation (Segregated Diversity). The last Path, narrating the rise of Richard Nixon (Richard 37th), is very much a capstone to the whole edifice of this work. What I call the "Nixon Tyranny" is the triumph of the Los Angeles regional political culture as the dominant regime for the United States in late 20th century. While all of these essays cover a lot of ground, Ghost Metropolis is by no means a "comprehensive" history of this metropolis. It is broad enough to give readers a very strong overall view of the metropolis, but it is no encyclopedia. In the end, it tells a specific story: how Los Angeles came to be so powerful on the national and world stage, what its leaders did with that power, and how the masses of people who made Los Angeles fared within social relations that took the form of the regimes that governed them.
These foci and all of the essays now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita); metropolitan development (Social Landscapes); petroleum and military-industrial politics (Manna From Hell); Hollywood (White Shadows); and race-ethnic segregation (Segregated Diversity). The last Path, narrating the rise of Richard Nixon (Richard 37th), is very much a capstone to the whole edifice of this work. What I call the "Nixon Tyranny" is the triumph of the Los Angeles regional political culture as the dominant regime for the United States in late 20th century. While all of these essays cover a lot of ground, Ghost Metropolis is by no means a "comprehensive" history of this metropolis. It is broad enough to give readers a very strong overall view of the metropolis, but it is no encyclopedia. In the end, it tells a specific story: how Los Angeles came to be so powerful on the national and world stage, what its leaders did with that power, and how the masses of people who made Los Angeles fared within social relations that took the form of the regimes that governed them.