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

Reader's Guide

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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-four 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 a sense of the scale of this work , it contains the equivalent of more than 600 typescript pages of text and more than 600 images/media objects.  



Clicking on  the title, Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles From Clovis to Nixon in the upper left will return you to the "home page."
 
The "List" Icon in the far upper left gives a cascading Table of Contents, showing the Paths, and when clicked, the essays within each Path.

The "Navigation" icon next to the List icon gives the option to revisit recent pages, to view visualizations of the work as a whole, and to access more information regarding Scalar, the platform within which this work is created.
 
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. 
 
 

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