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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New: Preface


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.  Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself.  The menu at the top of each page provides easy access to the the major starting points.

Navigating and reading Ghost Metropolis should be as easy as reading a newspaper.  The "home" icon in the upper left will give you a pre-set menu of the major sections of the work.  The sections that best 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 can also explore this work via any of its genres.

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.

This page has tags:

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

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