This site requires Javascript to be turned on. Please enable Javascript and reload the page.

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 Essays

677

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," each 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.

If the reader so wishes, she may begin at the first and read on to the forty-second, a journey that will be roughly chronological. Alternatively, the reader may read these essays as grouped by theme in "narrative paths."

This page has paths:

Networks Phil Ethington
Contents of this path:

Contents of this path:

This page is referenced by:

Reader's Guide
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, and these are organized around forty narrative essays that are grouped into six "narrative paths." The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. To give you a sense of the scale of the work you are reading, it contains about 450 typescript pages of text and more than 300 images. It also contains videos and other media that cannot be printed in books.

Clicking on the "Home" Icon or the title, Ghost Metropolis 2013 in the upper left will return you to the "front page."

The "quick links" menu at the top of each page provides easy access to major reference points.

The "List" Icon gives a Table of Contents with starting points for major Paths

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.

Navigating and reading Ghost Metropolis should be as easy as reading a newspaper. The sections that 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.

Readers who wish to grasp the core "argument" of Ghost Metropolis may wish to begin with the 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.

Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible 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, and 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.