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How did Calle de los Negros get its name? And why did the city raze it in 1887?
For 36 years, just one structure loomed especially large over Los Angeles' undisturbed horizontality: City Hall.
On October 24, 1871, a mob of Anglos and Latinos murdered nearly 20 Chinese immigrants.
When the transcontinental railroad reached Southern California in 1876, it fueled a powerful promotional machine that promised more about Southern California – and its “semi-tropical” climate – than reality could support.
Every train to California was a magic carpet, a means to one of the most varied and exciting destinations on earth.
L.A. once sold its climate as "semi-tropical" – a term that emphasized the uniqueness of its nature. Semi-tropical was semi-miraculous.
L.A. for a generation was extraordinarily violent, even more violent than frontier towns more famous in Western lore.
When a man dies hanging from a tree, is that tree an accessory to the act or a witness? The multiple second lives of the frontier "hang tree" reveal something unsettling about the Golden State.
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What do Southern California’s hanging trees say about the region’s attitudes toward its bloody past?
The Pacific Southwest Exposition embodied the spirit of 1920s Hollywood: spectacle for its own sake, cheerful vulgarity, and commercial hard sell.
In the 1880s, an author-activist and a once-prominent Angeleno unwittingly constructed an enduring Spanish fantasy past myth for Southern California.
From the beginning, racial and ethnic conflict have been embedded in the matrix of California's development.