A journalist and case writer presents a social history of Los Angeles, from Prohibition to the Watts riots, focusing on the long-running war between notorious gangster Mickey Cohen, and the man who would become the city's most famous police chief, William H. Parker.

A sweeping history of Los Angeles told through the lens of the many marginalized groups-from hobos to taggers-that have used the city's walls as a channel for communication. Graffiti written in storm drain tunnels, on neighborhood walls, and under bridges tells an underground and, until now, untold history of Los Angeles. Drawing on extensive research within the city's urban landscape, Susan A. Phillips traces the hidden language of marginalized groups...

"Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now is a provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of America's most confounding metropolis--not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state. America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America's...

Documents the kaleidoscopic year during which transformative talents from Hollywood, Sunset Boulevard, and Beverly Hills heavily influenced pop culture, politics, and social movements.

"In 1938, China City opened near downtown Los Angeles. Featuring a recreation of the House of Wang set from MGM's The Good Earth, this new Chinatown employed many of the same Chinese Americans who performed as background extras in the 1937 film. Chinatown and Hollywood represented the two primary sites where Chinese Americans performed racial difference for popular audiences during the Chinese exclusion era. In Performing Chinatown, historian William...

A Canadian veteran of D-Day travels through New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, struggling with his memories of the war and experiencing firsthand America's postwar social and racial divisions. The story is told in verse and illustrations --

"The Exiles" of the title are displaced Native Americans, living in late 1950s Los Angeles on Bunker Hill, a depressed area connected to the rest of the city by the Angels Flight trolley. The Indians were already exiles, from the moment they lost their ancestral lands and were confined to reservations. Starting on Friday afternoon and closing Saturday morning, the film follows pregnant Yvonne, her husband Homer, and their Mexican acquaintance Tommy...