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.
Its throne may sit vacant today, but for roughly a century the Inland Empire paid fealty to a powerful emperor: the orange.
Hollywood was once known as "the pride of the Cahuenga Valley." So how did an entire valley vanish from L.A.'s cultural topography?
L.A. once reigned as the viticulture capital of California.
Before Scully, Koufax, or Lasorda, other legends emerged from L.A.'s Elysian Hills.
A 1985 methane explosion turned L.A.'s Fairfax district into a hellish landscape.
Our city--often associated with brown skies, high-speed pavement, and its concrete river--still maintains an intimate relationship with nature.
L.A. and its surrounding valleys sit upon thousands of feet of thick sediment deposited by eons of floodwaters.
Surveyors once named L.A. boulevards after American presidents and governors of the Mexican California.
In the late 1850s, saloons imported the town's first commercially available ice, which rarely occurs naturally in Los Angeles.
How did Southern Californians come to treat their highway route numbers as if they were proper names?
UC Irvine's campus, now 50 years old, was unlike any that preceded it.
The shape of California's state highway shield mimics the spade of a Gold Rush miner.