Nathan Masters
Nathan Masters is host and executive producer of Lost L.A., an Emmy Award-winning public television series from KCET and the USC Libraries. The show explores how rare artifacts from Southern California's archives can unlock hidden and often-surprising stories from the region's past. Nathan’s writing has appeared in many publications, including Los Angeles Magazine and the Los Angeles Times. He also helps manage public programs and media initiatives at the USC Libraries, home to the L.A. as Subjectresearch consortium.
These 3-D images were the closest many viewers would ever come to glimpsing Los Angeles with their own two eyes.
It was the flood that convinced Southern California to dam and channelize its untrustworthy rivers.
Park visitors once crowded Yosemite Valley meadows every night to see the stream of red-hot embers fall from Glacier Point.
In 1840, California's Mexican authorities deported 46 Americans and Britons who had settled in the territory illegally.
With their fanciful imaginings and their deliberate distortions, these six maps of California will challenge your preconceptions about the Golden State.
Snow once fell on the Los Angeles coastal plain roughly once per decade, but the city is now in the middle of a 54-year snow drought.
From candy-cane streetcars to Broadway twinkle lights, vintage photos reveal how Southern California once decorated its public spaces for the holidays.
Hollywood at the turn of the 20th century was a small country hamlet where lemon trees outnumbered people.
A hypothetical Interstate 1 would trace North America’s western margin, where the Pacific foams against a fractured landmass.
Neither candidate took much notice of Los Angeles during the 1852 presidential campaign – and why would they? The City of Angels was then a dusty adobe village of some 2,000 souls, a frontier outpost within a state worth only four electoral votes.
A conversation about "Her," the Bradbury Building, JPL, Octavia Butler, and imagining utopic and dystopic futures for the City of Angels.
Though extremely rare, tropical cyclones have pummeled California in the past.