Read complete books and articles on: Los Angeles History

Los Angeles - lôs ănˈjələs, lŏs, ănˈjəlēzˌ, city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. A port of entry on the Pacific coast, with a fine harbor at San Pedro Bay, it is the second largest U.S. city in population and one of the largest in area. Two mountain ranges, the Santa Monica and

Economy and Transportation

Los Angeles is a shipping, industrial, communication, financial, fashion, and distribution center for the W United States and much of the Pacific Rim. It is also the motion picture, television, radio, and recording capital of the United States, if not the world, housing numerous studios. Once an agricultural distribution center, Los Angeles is a leading producer of clothing and textiles, aircraft, computers and software, paper, toys, glass, furniture, wire, biomedical products, electrical and electronic machinery, pharmaceuticals, petrochemicals, and fabricated metal. Tourism, printing and publishing, food processing, and oil refining are also important.

Los Angeles has one of the busiest ports in the United States, with roughly half of its commerce coming from other nations, and its international airport is one of the world's busiest. The metropolitan area's vast freeway system has made Los Angeles the archetypal auto-dependent urban area. The huge number of motor vehicles, combined with the city's valley location, often creates dangerously high smog levels. A light-rail system (opened in 1990) and buses alleviate freeway congestion only a little; a new subway (completed 2000) also provides insignificant relief.

Maintaining an adequate water supply has long been a problem for Los Angeles. The city obtains most of its water from California's Central Valley to the north. In 1992 the city ended protracted litigation with environmentalists when it agreed to curtail water diversion in certain areas until ecological recovery had been achieved.

Communities of the Metropolitan Area

The vast Los Angeles metropolitan area covers five counties (Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, and Ventura) and encompasses 34,000 sq mi (88,000 sq km) with over 14.5 million people. As Los Angeles rapidly expanded throughout the 20th cent., it absorbed numerous communities and enclosed independent municipalities. Among the communities now part of Los Angeles are Central City, Hollywood, San Pedro, Sylmar, Watts, Westwood, Bel-Air, and Boyle Heights. Independent municipalities surrounded by Los Angeles include Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and San Fernando. Incorporated cities in the broader metropolitan region with populations of 80,000 or more include Alhambra, Anaheim, Burbank, Downey, El Monte, Fullerton, Garden Grove, Glendale, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Inglewood, Lakewood, Long Beach, Moreno Valley, Norwalk, Oceanside, Ontario, Orange, Oxnard, Pasadena, Pomona, Rancho Cucamonga, Riverside, San Bernardino, Santa Ana, Santa Clarita, Santa Monica, Simi Valley, Thousand Oaks, and Torrance (see separate articles), in addition to Los Angeles itself.

Points of Interest

In Los Angeles are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art; and historical, movie, industrial, and science museums. The large Music Center includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (1964), with four theaters housing the Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles Opera, and Los Angeles Master Chorale; the Ahmanson Theater; the Mark Taper Forum; and, across Grand Ave., Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall (2003), home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Also downtown is the monumental Our Lady of the Angels cathedral (2002), designed by Raphael Moneo. Los Angeles has botanical gardens and many parks, including Griffith Park, with a zoo and a planetarium. The La Brea Tar Pits are famous for Ice Age fossils. The motion-picture and television industries, the proximity of many resorts, theme parks, and beaches, and a climate that encourages year-round outdoor recreation attract millions of tourists annually. Other area attractions include the Santa Anita and Hollywood Park racetracks, Knott's Berry Farm, and Disneyland (at Anaheim). Among the city's many educational institutions are the Univ. of Southern California; the Univ. of California, Los Angeles; two California State Univ. campuses (Los Angeles and Northridge); Occidental College; Loyola Marymount Univ.; Pepperdine Univ.; and the Colburn School of Performing Arts.

In 1982 the Los Angeles area gained its second National Football League franchise (the other being the Rams) when the Oakland Raiders moved to the city. In 1995, however, the Rams moved to St. Louis, and the Raiders subsequently returned to Oakland, Calif., leaving the city without a professional football team. In baseball, the National League's Los Angeles Dodgers and the American League's Anaheim Angels represent the area. The metropolitan area also has two National Basketball Association teams (the Lakers and the Clippers) and two National Hockey League teams (the Kings and Anaheim's Mighty Ducks).

History

The site of the city was visited by the Spanish explorer Gaspar de Portolá in 1769, and in 1781 El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles de Porciuncula (Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula) was founded. Located on the Los Angeles River, the city served several times as the capital of the Spanish colonial province of Alta California and was a cattle-ranching center. In 1846 Los Angeles was captured from the Mexicans by U.S. forces. The arrival of the railroads (Southern Pacific in 1876; Santa Fe in 1885) and the discovery of oil in the early 1890s stimulated expansion, as did the development of the motion-picture industry in the early 20th cent.

During World War II Los Angeles boomed as a center for the production of war supplies and munitions, and thousands of African Americans migrated to Los Angeles to fill factory jobs. After the war massive suburban growth made the city enormously prosperous, but also created or exacerbated a variety of urban problems. In 1965, the African-American community of Watts was the site of six days of race rioting that left 34 people dead and caused over $200 million in property damage.

In the 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles experienced dramatic growth through immigration. In 1990 the Hispanic population of metropolitan Los Angeles was almost 5 million (almost 40% of the population) and the area's Asian population was over 1.3 million. In addition to an already well-established Japanese-American community, recent immigration has come from China, South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, and other nations.

In the 1980s, violent gang warfare over the illegal drug (especially "crack" cocaine) trade became a serious problem for law enforcement officials. In Apr., 1992, the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers on charges of police brutality (they had been videotaped beating a black motorist) touched off race riots in south-central Los Angeles and other areas. Fifty-eight people died, thousands were arrested, and property damage totaled approximately $1 billion. Natural disasters have also taken their toll. Portions of Los Angeles are subject to wildfires and rockslides, and the 1994 earthquake centered in Northridge in N Los Angeles, which killed 72 and cost $25 billion, was only the latest to have caused damage to the city and surrounding areas. Attention was again riveted on Los Angeles during the O. J. Simpson trial, which ended in acquittal in 1995.

Bibliography

See R. M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis (1967); R. Banham, Los Angeles (1973); R. Steiner, Los Angeles: The Centrifugal City (1982); H. J. Nelson, The Los Angeles Metropolis (1982); S. L. Bottles, Los Angeles and the Automobile: The Making of the Modern City (1987); M. Davis, Los Angeles (1991) and Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998); B. Gumprecht, The Los Angeles River (1999).

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14 of the Best Books and Articles on: Los Angeles History

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past » Read Now
by William Deverell. 330 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. "Whitewashed Adobe "considers six different developments in the history of the city--including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the...
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Chronicling the rise of Los Angeles through shifting ideas of race and ethnicity, William Deverell offers a unique perspective on how the city grew and changed. "Whitewashed Adobe "considers six different developments in the history of the city--including the cementing of the Los Angeles River, the outbreak of bubonic plague in 1924, and the evolution of America's largest brickyard in the 1920s. In an absorbing narrative supported by a number of previously unpublished period photographs, Deverell shows how a city that was once part of Mexico itself came of age through appropriating--and even obliterating--the region's connections to Mexican places and people.
Deverell portrays Los Angeles during the 1850s as a city seething with racial enmity due to the recent war with Mexico. He explains how, within a generation, the city's business interests, looking for a commercially viable way to establish urban identity, borrowed Mexican cultural traditions and put on a carnival called La Fiesta de Los Angeles. He analyzes the subtle ways in which ethnicity came to bear on efforts to corral the unpredictable Los Angeles River and shows how the resident Mexican population was put to work fashioning the modern metropolis. He discusses how Los Angeles responded to the nation's last major outbreak of bubonic plague and concludes by considering the Mission Play, a famed drama tied to regional assumptions about history, progress, and ethnicity. Taking all of these elements
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2.

Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920's » Read Now
by Kevin Starr. 500 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Kevin Starr is the foremost chronicler of the California dream and indeed one of the finest narrative historians writing today on any subject. The first two installments of his monumental cultural history, Americans and the California Dream, have been hailed as "mature, well-proportioned and...
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Kevin Starr is the foremost chronicler of the California dream and indeed one of the finest narrative historians writing today on any subject. The first two installments of his monumental cultural history, Americans and the California Dream, have been hailed as "mature, well-proportioned and marvelously diverse (and diverting)" (The New York Times Book Review), "rich in details and alive with interesting, and sometimes incredible people" (Los Angeles Times), and "a luminous and delightful saga that will become an American classic" (W. Jackson Bate). Now, in Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
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3.

Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era » Read Now
by Kevin Starr. 420 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that...
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This second volume in Kevin Starr's passionate and ambitious cultural history of the Golden State focuses on the turn-of-the-century years and the emergence of Southern California as a regional culture in its own right. "How hauntingly beautiful, how replete with lost possibilities, seems that Southern California of two and three generations ago, now that a dramatically diferent society has emerged in its place," writes Starr. As he recreates the "lost California," Starr examines the rich variety of elements that figured in the growth of the Southern California way of life: the Spanish/Mexican roots, the fertile land, the Mediterranean-like climate, the special styles in architecture, the rise of Hollywood. He gives us a broad array of engaging (and often eccentric) characters: from Harrision Gray Otis to Helen Hunt Jackson to Cecil B. DeMille. Whether discussing the growth of winemaking or the burgeoning of reform movements, Starr keeps his central theme in sharp focus: how Californians defined their identity to themselves and to the nation.
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4.

The Cattle on a Thousand Hills: Southern California, 1850-1870 » Read Now
by Robert Glass Cleland. 342 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
5.

L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present » Read Now
by Josh Sides. 288 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass--embodying both the best and worst of what urban America...
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In 1964 an Urban League survey ranked Los Angeles as the most desirable city for African Americans to live in. In 1965 the city burst into flames during one of the worst race riots in the nation's history. How the city came to such a pass--embodying both the best and worst of what urban America offered black migrants from the South--is the story told for the first time in this history of modern black Los Angeles. A clear-eyed and compelling look at black struggles for equality in L.A.'s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces from the Great Depression to our day, "L.A. City Limits "critically refocuses the ongoing debate about the origins of America's racial and urban crisis.
Challenging previous analysts' near-exclusive focus on northern "rust-belt" cities devastated by de-industrialization, Josh Sides asserts that the cities to which black southerners migrated profoundly affected how they fared. He shows how L.A.'s diverse racial composition, dispersive geography, and dynamic postwar economy often created opportunities--and limits--quite different from those encountered by blacks in the urban North.
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6.

Mi Raza Primero! (My People First!): Nationalism, Identity, and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles, 1966-1978 » Read Now
by Ernesto Chavez. 166 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

"Chavez provides a fresh and thoughtful analysis of a critical period of ethnic political experimentation. "!Mi Raza Primero! offers much food for thought for readers interested in the Chicano movement--and for anyone seeking to understand the increasing complexity of ethnic politics in the current...
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"Chavez provides a fresh and thoughtful analysis of a critical period of ethnic political experimentation. "!Mi Raza Primero! offers much food for thought for readers interested in the Chicano movement--and for anyone seeking to understand the increasing complexity of ethnic politics in the current moment."--David G. Gutierrez, author of "Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity
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7.

Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900-1945 » Read Now
by George J. Sanchez. 367 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing...
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Twentieth-century Los Angeles has been the locus of one of the most profound and complex interactions between variant cultures in American history. Yet this study is among the first to examine the relationship between ethnicity and identity among the largest immigrant group to that city. By focusing on Mexican immigrants to Los Angeles from 1900 to 1945, George J. Sanchez explores the process by which temporary sojourners altered their orientation to that of permanent residents, thereby laying the foundation for a new Mexican-American culture. Analyzing not only formal programs aimed at these newcomers by the United States and Mexico, but also the world created by these immigrants through family networks, religious practice, musical entertainment, and work and consumption patterns, Sanchez uncovers the creative ways Mexicans adapted their culture to life in the United States. When a formal repatriation campaign pushed thousands to return to Mexico, those remaining in Los Angeles launched new campaigns to gain civil rights as ethnic Americans through labor unions and New Deal politics. The immigrant generation, therefore, laid the groundwork for the emerging Mexican-American identity of their children.
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8.

Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Koreans in Los Angeles, 1965-1982 » Read Now
by Edna Bonacich, Ivan Huber Light. 528 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
9.

Hazardous Metropolis: Flooding and Urban Ecology in Los Angeles » Read Now
by Jared Orsi. 276 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library

Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history--the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood...
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Although better known for its sunny skies, Los Angeles suffers devastating flooding. This book explores a fascinating and little-known chapter in the city's history--the spectacular failures to control floods that occurred throughout the twentieth century. Despite the city's 114 debris dams, 5 flood control basins, and nearly 500 miles of paved river channels, Southern Californians have discovered that technologically engineered solutions to flooding are just as disaster-prone as natural waterways. Jared Orsi's lively history unravels the strange and often hazardous ways that engineering, politics, and nature have come together in Los Angeles to determine the flow of water. He advances a new paradigm--the urban ecosystem--for understanding the city's complex and unpredictable waterways and other issues that are sure to play a large role in future planning.
As he traces the flow of water from sky to sea, Orsi brings together many disparate and intriguing pieces of the story, including local andnational politics, the little-known San Gabriel Dam fiasco, the phenomenal growth of Los Angeles, and, finally, the influence of environmentalism. Orsi provocatively widens his vision toward other cities for which Los Angeles may offer a lesson--both of things gone wrong and a glimpse of how they might be improved.
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10.

William Mulholland and the Rise of Los Angeles » Read Now
by Catherine Mulholland. 411 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

William Mulholland presided over the creation of a water system that forever changed the course of southern California's history. Mulholland, a self-taught engineer, was the chief architect of the Owens Valley Aqueduct--a project ranking in magnitude and daring with the Panama Canal--that brought...
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William Mulholland presided over the creation of a water system that forever changed the course of southern California's history. Mulholland, a self-taught engineer, was the chief architect of the Owens Valley Aqueduct--a project ranking in magnitude and daring with the Panama Canal--that brought water to semi-arid Los Angeles from the lush Owens Valley. The story of Los Angeles's quest for water is both famous and notorious: it has been the subject of the classic yet historically distorted movie "Chinatown, as well as many other accounts. This first full-length biography of Mulholland challenges many of the prevailing versions of his life story and sheds new light on the history of Los Angeles and its relationship with its most prized resource: water.
Catherine Mulholland, the engineer's granddaughter, provides insights into this story that family familiarity affords, and adds to our historical understanding with extensive primary research in sources such as Mulholland's recently uncoveredoffice files, newspapers, and Department of Water and Power archives. She scrutinizes Mulholland's life--from his childhood in Ireland to his triumphant completion of the Owens Valley Aqueduct to the tragedy that ended his career.
This vivid portrait of a rich chapter in the history of Los Angeles is enhanced with a generous selection of previously unpublished photographs.
"Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000
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11.

Official Negligence: How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD » Read Now
by Lou Cannon. 752 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library

In the spring of 1992 five days of rioting laid waste to South Central Los Angeles, took scores of lives, cost the city more than $900 million in property damages, and captured the attention of horrified people worldwide. Lou Cannon combines extensive research with interviews from hundreds of...
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In the spring of 1992 five days of rioting laid waste to South Central Los Angeles, took scores of lives, cost the city more than $900 million in property damages, and captured the attention of horrified people worldwide. Lou Cannon combines extensive research with interviews from hundreds of survivors, offering the only definitive story behind what happened and why.
Official Negligence takes a hard look at the circumstances leading up to the riots. Cannon reveals how the videotape of the brutal beating of Rodney King had been sensationally edited by a local TV station, how political leaders required LAPD officers to carry metal batons despite evidence linking them to the rising toll of serious injury in the community, and how poorly prepared the city was for the violence that erupted.
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12.

The Start of Something Big: Theater Music in Los Angeles, 1880-1900, in California History » Read Now
by Kenneth H. Marcus. 20 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
13.

Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles » Read Now
by Eric Avila. 308 pgs.

Collections: History, Entire Library
14.

The Hollywood Social Problem Film: Madness, Despair, and Politics from the Depression to the Fifties » Read Now
by Peter Roffman, Jim Purdy. 388 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library