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Lost LA
Red Gold: The Demise of California's Redwood Forest
In the course of its relentless growth, Los Angeles paved over its local prairies and drained its wetlands. But the city’s ecological destruction extended far beyond Southern California. Take the once-mighty temperate rainforests of California’s redwood coast. Only five percent of the state’s old-growth redwood forests now remain – a fact for which Los Angeles deserves a great deal of blame. In the early 20th century, the port of Los Angeles was a leading importer of redwood lumber, the choice building material for the residential structures of Angelenos who saw little connection to the city’s adobe past. Today, beneath the painted clapboard of Angelino Heights’ Victorian mansions, stand skeletons of redwood timber.
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How Filipino Americans in Southern California are making their heritage more visible.
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Iconic fast-food chains from McDonald’s to Taco Bell were born in SoCal.
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After internment camps, Japanese Americans made L.A.'s Crenshaw neighborhood their home.
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Dig deep into Southern California’s past to reveal lessons for our climate-changed future.
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Explore a forgotten age when winemaking was Southern California’s principal industry.
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Why did Los Angeles dismantle one of the greatest rail transit systems in the nation?
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Explore the lasting impact of the Shindana Toy Company, created out of the need for community empowerment following the 1965 Watts uprising, whose ethnically correct black dolls forever changed the American doll industry.
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As recently as a century ago, scientists doubted whether the universe extended beyond our own Milky Way — until astronomer Edwin Hubble, working with the world’s most powerful telescope discovered just how vast the universe is.
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Although best known for designing the homes of celebrities like Lucille Ball and Frank Sinatra, the pioneering African-American architect Paul Revere Williams also contributed to some of the city’ s most recognizable civic structures.
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Prohibition may have outlawed liquor, but that didn’t mean the booze stopped flowing. Explore the myths of subterranean Los Angeles, crawl through prohibition-era tunnels, and visit some of the city’s oldest speakeasies.
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During World War II, three renowned photographers captured scenes from the Japanese incarceration: outsiders Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams and incarceree Tōyō Miyatake who boldly smuggled in a camera lens to document life from within the camp.
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Griffith Park is one of the largest municipal parks in the United States. Its founder, Griffith J. Griffith, donated the land to the city as a public recreation ground for all the people — an ideal that has been challenged over the years.