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.

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 V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
           Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
           Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
           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

4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
           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

5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
           Sympathy for the Devil
           The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010

6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
           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.

This page has tags:

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

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