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 work about a very large and very old region.  It is composed of hundreds of elemental units: in multiple genres, textual and visual.  These basic units are organized using the Scalar digital publishing platform, in Scalar's elemental unit, the "page."  Each page in Ghost Metropolis belongs also to a "path," and each also has "tag" relationships to other pages.

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) our visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures; and 3) the cartographic, which is a special, spatial medium that visualizes 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 between subject areas, along a relatively consistent time-depth: in more familiar terms, in the same chronological period.  It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives.

The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five thematic narrative paths: 
1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race

Reviewers are asked to bear in mind that not all forty essays have been woven together with a visual narrative.  Those that have are indicated above.

This page has tags:

  1. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 Phil Ethington
  2. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington

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