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• 1 2013-06-13T15:46:56-07:00 Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 88 Complete Final Draft 2013 plain 2013-11-28T21:25:06-08:00 Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since the earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print and online formats. It aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles.  Past actors inscribed their labors into the landscape and left the scene; their actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant--shaping later lives invisibly.  
  Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who ruled the region until conquered by the first humans, is the original demon haunting El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels.  The past is the landscape of what took place.  The presence of the past is the inscribed form of human labor projected beyond the deaths of previous generations, haunting every global landscape.  Historians make the ghosts of the past visible.  Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, not merely for the sheer pleasure of reading narratives in text, cartography, photography, and video, but ultimately for the goal of accountability.  The blood of countless generations stains the streets of Los Angeles.  Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of The Angels visible, readable, knowable, and therefore actionable. This work follows several models:  Livy's history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (53 BCE); Plutarch's Lives (c. 100 CE); Cervantes's Don Quijote (1601-15); Shakespeare's Richard III (1592), Macbeth (c. 1605); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949).  Equally a visual work, Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “Atlas,” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography.  It owes a deep debt to the Renaissance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau.  My own Ghost Maps are extensions of this tradition.  This is also a work of the photographic and cinematic age.  Ghost Metropolis draws these previous textual and visual traditions together into a multimedia work of interactive storytelling and argumentation. A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose, it is free of theoretical terms or jargon of any kind.  While it is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published elsewhere, it is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely.  Please visit the Reader's Guide, which explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths and the weblike network intersections.   Preamble Los Angeles, California, United States of America, is the heart of the Southern California region, a global metropolis so huge and complex that its weight in world history would be impossible to calculate. This graphic history attempts to tell its story, since the beginnings of the city as a permanent settlement. Los Angeles has devoured millions of immigrants, harbored millions of residents, birthed millions more. It breathes in and exhales tens of millions of visitors daily and yearly through its ports, airports, and highways. Its gargantuan human population--16.5 million in 2000--is drawn from all continents of the Earth. These teeming millions stand atop the shoulders of the many millions who preceded them as settlers and sojourners, each individual altering the region in some way, small or large. These millions--since the age of Smilodon the sabre-toothed cat and the long-tusked Mammoths, through the Age of Aerospace, of which Los Angeles served as founding global capital--have been drawn to Los Angeles for the riches and freedoms and pleasures that it promises, and has promised, for thousands of years. Los Angeles has been the site of joy and beauty for many, but it has also been a deadly siren, devouring its lovers in chronic and spectacular paroxysms of repression and social violence. The ghosts of the injustices of the past haunt us in the form of institutions of unequal power etched into the landscapes all around us. Also surviving among these ghosts are the institutional beginnings of human rights, the echos to our ears and reflections to our eyes, emanating from past champions of justice. While Ghost Metropolis lies on the cynical side of historical appreciation, it also shines a  spotlight on those who have contributed creative spirit to the future triumph of peace and justice, so that hope may endure for a metropolis that promotes the human rights of all.
• 1 2013-12-09T07:32:21-08:00 Intro Page for Reviewers 33 root plain 2013-12-10T10:49:53-08:00
  Dear Reviewer:  This page is a meta-introduction to Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000.  The actual introductory page, and the pages that immediately link from it, should eventually suffice for most readers in its final form, but Ghost Metropolis is not yet in its final form.  It is in a preliminary review form, using the web publishing platform Scalar.  Portions of this work have been published or exhibited in many venues, but only in preparation for this final assembly of this 13,000-year history of a metropolitan region that shaped world history.  
  For the quickest and most direct look at how a typical finished narrative essay looks, see "Crossroads of the LA Metropolis."
  NOTE: Click on the "Home" icon or the Title to return to the first page.  The menu at the top of each page provides easy access to major starting points.
  Because it is nearly unprecedented to submit a book-scale, research-based "monograph" as a multi-genre, multimedia web production by a historian who is also a photographer, cartographer, and co-creator of research software programs, I want the reviewers to read a few paragraphs of context.
  Ghost Metropolis is a mixed-media production whose principal ingredients are: Text; Photography; Cartography.  This is emphatically not an illustrated history.  It is a textual history, a visual history, and a spatial history.
  Ghost Metropolis is the culmination of a decade and a half of labor.  I first launched this project while a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 1997, always intending it to be a hybrid of text, photography, and cartography.  Over the ensuing years, I wrote more than forty (40) historical essays about Los Angeles on a vide variety of topics, and these are woven together here.  I also produced hundreds of images and maps.  Most of this work clustered around my investigations of major topics, which now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita), urban development (Inscribing Los Angeles) petroleum politics (Manna From Hell) Hollywood (White Shadows); the rise of Nixon (Richard 37th); and racial segregation (Segregated Diversity). 
  A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose.  Except for a few essays written in a social science idiom, it is free of theoretical terms.  While it is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published elsewhere, it is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely.  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.
  Like other historians, I have labored countless hours in the archives and reading books and writing and re-writing theoretical, narrative and social scientific texts.  Unlike most historians, I have also labored countless hours making maps and photographs.  In cartography, those hours go into converting research into pictorial maps: analyzing the data and designing and producing the visualizations of human action in space and time, to persuade viewers, or to inform them, or just to recount what took place.  More than fifty of my own thematic maps appear throughout Ghost Metropolis, plus a series of reference maps in a visually layered form that I have invented, called "ghost maps."  I have also invented other tools for visualizing the complex metropolitan past, such as "Transections" and the "Isolation-Diversity Plot."
  I also made hundreds of photographs and photomontages, working both with my own camera and with archival photographs.  My photography does not provide illustration nor decoration to a textual argument.  Photography, as I handle it in Ghost Metropolis, is an end in itself, a parallel genre to textuality.  Photography is powerfully enhanced with companion text, but in principle it can stand on its own. Photography is an instrument for seeing, knowing, and portraying the past. As a photorealist, I do claim that photography enables us literally to see the past...differently but no more clearly than with textuality or cartography or any other tool.  My strategy in Ghost Metropolis is to use as many tools as I can to make the almost-impossibly large and complex phenomenon of "Global Los Angeles" knowable and understandable and readable.
  Thirdly, the platform in which Ghost Metropolis is now presented to you--Scalar--bears some introductory remarks.  Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form.  (Full disclosure: I am one of the PIs of the Mellon grants and one of developers of Scalar).  Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways.  It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels.  Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers.  But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper.  It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar.  All you need to do is follow your interests.
  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.
  The best place to start for reviewers who wish to grasp the core "argument" of Ghost Metropolis is the set of 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. 
  BELOW IS A COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS.  ALL ESSAYS ARE IN GHOST METROPOLIS, BUT ONLY THOSE WITH LINKS HAVE THE COMPANION NARRATIVES BUILT OUT.  Readers may access any of the essays, finished or not, via the Narrative Path pages.
  1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
             Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).

             Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)

             Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)

             Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)

             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 VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)

             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

             Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars
  4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
             Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry

             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

             Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood

             Hollywood’s White Hunters

             Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City
  5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
             Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994

             Sympathy for the Devil

             The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010
  6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
             Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000

             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.
  .
   
• 1 2013-12-11T08:32:58-08:00 Preface 27 Root plain 2014-03-07T09:48:03-08:00
  Ghost Metropolis is a mixed-media production that aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. Because the past is the landscape of what took place, Ghost Metropolis maps and visualizes at the same time that it narrates and analyzes the past.  Its principal ingredients are text, photography, and cartography.  It is a textual, visual history, and spatial history.
  Ghost Metropolis is the culmination of a decade and a half of labor, initiated while I was fellow at the Getty Research Institute in 1997, with the ambitious goal of making the deep and complex past of a mighty global metropolis knowable, understandable, and visible.  As an interdisciplinary historian in the tradition Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel, I knew that such a task would require the tools of several disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences. Over the ensuing years, I wrote more than forty historical essays about Los Angeles on a wide variety of topics.  These were all intended to be woven together eventually, and that is what I have done here.  I also produced hundreds of images and maps.  Most of this work clustered around my investigations of major topics, which now form the six principal "narrative paths" of Ghost Metropolis: the long history of ruling regimes of the Los Angeles region (Ab Urbe Condita); urban development (Inscribing Los Angeles); petroleum and military-industrial politics (Manna From Hell); Hollywood (White Shadows); the rise of Nixon (Richard 37th); and racial segregation (Segregated Diversity). 
  A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose.  Except for a few essays written in a social science idiom, it is free of theoretical terms.  Ghost Metropolis is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published throughout the project, as I have attempted to solve puzzles regarding the spatial and visual dimension of the human past.   But those theoretical writings are "groundwork," while the present work is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely. 
  Because this a book-scale, research-based "monograph" presented as a multi-genre, multimedia web production by a historian who is also a photographer, cartographer, and co-creator of the online platform in which it is assembled, key features of this work merit a few prefatory remarks. This is a multimedia work for some very fundamental reasons.  My strategy in Ghost Metropolis is to use as many tools as I can to make the almost-impossibly large and complex phenomenon of "Global Los Angeles" knowable and understandable and readable.
  First, this is emphatically not an illustrated history.  I have developed and carefully sharpened tools for investigating and representing the past not only textually, but visually. Why? Any region, or any metropolis, is a massive spatial configuration of human relations.  As we have learned from Henri Lefebvre and others, people not only live in spaces: they produce the places and spaces that are essential to the structuring, organization, rights, freedoms, and privileges of societies.  This inescapable spatiality can be mapped and visualized, as one means toward historical knowledge and understanding.  So, unlike most historians, in addition to researching in textual sources and writing textual accounts, I have also devoted a great deal of energy toward converting research into pictorial maps: analyzing the data and designing and producing the visualizations of human action in space and time, to persuade viewers, or to inform them, or just to recount what took place.  More than fifty of my own thematic maps appear throughout Ghost Metropolis, plus a series of reference maps in a visually layered form that I have invented, called "ghost maps."  I have also invented other tools for visualizing the complex metropolitan past, such as "Transections" and the "Isolation-Diversity Plot."
  If spatial analysis and representation is a mode of research and argumentation parallel to textual modes, so too is photography.  Photography is an instrument for seeing, knowing, and portraying the past. As a photorealist, I claim that photography enables us literally to see the past: no more clearly or reliably than with textuality or cartography or any other tool, but differently, and in its own way, powerfully.  My photography does not provide illustration nor decoration to a textual argument.  Photography, as I handle it in Ghost Metropolis, is an end in itself, a parallel genre to textuality. Photography is greatly enriched with companion text, but in principle it can stand on its own.   These three modes or channels of communication are synergistic: they complement and reinforce one another.  I have intentionally set them into interaction with one another, which is why text and images are woven together in the visually completed essays.
  Thirdly, the platform in which Ghost Metropolis is now presented to you--Scalar--bears some introductory remarks.  Scalar was developed within a large inter-institutional collaboration funded by the Mellon Foundation to provide an optimized environment for scholarly publishing in multimedia form. (I am co-PI of this project).  Scalar has a "flat" structure, so that every "page" (which can be textual material, or media objects, or tags or paths or annotations) can be related to every other page in many different ways.  It is not hierarchical like most web sites, so you don't have to work your way back up out of deep tunnels.  Rather, you can skip freely across its elements in the way we read newspapers or, well, websites.  But the "platform" should not itself demand much of your attention while you read Ghost Metropolis, any more than you need worry about the technicalities of paper or ink when you read a newspaper. It takes no knowledge of digital media whatsoever to read Ghost Metropolis in Scalar.  All you need to do is follow your interests. 
  Ghost Metropolis is not yet in its final form.  It is in a preliminary review form.  It is nearly without any design customization at this point, in order for referees to focus fully on its content.  Later, if accepted for publication, the design team of that press and myself will decide how much design work to add to the current "defaults" of the Scalar platform. This online edition is intended to be released simultaneously with a printed edition, which will be produced from, and contain a subset of the material in this online edition.  The print form, which still needs to be edited and designed, should preserve the conceptual design of this online form.   Portions of this work have been published or exhibited in many venues, all in preparation for this final assembly of this 13,000-year history of a metropolitan region that shaped world history.  This presentation in Scalar is intended to be the final iteration, capping several design cycles I have been through, to conceptualize a form of presentation that optimizes the readability of such a large volume of diverse materials all dedicated to a common goal. Not all of the essays, however have been fully built-out with their visual companions.
  A representative look at a typical finished narrative can be reviewed with the essay "Crossroads of the LA Metropolis."
  BELOW IS A COMPLETE TABLE OF CONTENTS.  ALL ESSAYS ARE IN GHOST METROPOLIS, BUT ONLY THOSE WITH LINKS IN THE TABLE BELOW HAVE THE COMPANION VISUAL NARRATIVES BUILT OUT. Readers may access any of the essays, finished or not, via the Narrative Path pages, but it is recommended to begin with the more completely visualized essays. 
  1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
             Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).

             Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)

             Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)

             Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)

             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 VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)

             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 Network
             The Mating Dance of LA Arts and Architecture, 1900-1950
             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
             Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts            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

             Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars
  4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
             Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry

             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

             Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood

             Hollywood’s White Hunters

             Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City
  5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
             Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994

             Sympathy for the Devil

             The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010
  6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
             Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000

             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.
  .