Philip J. Ethington

A historian, political scientist, sociologist, cartographer and digital archive guru (and that’s just brushing the surface), Phil Ethington is set to publish a global history of Los Angeles that goes back 13,000 years. It will take three forms – a book/atlas, an online collaborative interactive version and public art. The wide-ranging scholar chatted with writer Allison Engel about his multimedia project in April 2009.

You’ve called your project, Ghost Metropolis, a “history of the world.”

Yes, because Los Angeles does contain the history of the world, or at least it touches on the history of the world. It’s a highly diverse metropolis with populations from all over the world – and some of the leading populations from all over the world. You’ve heard the statistics: the largest Korean population outside of Korea and so on. This makes it ultra-hard to write a history of this place because you wind up needing to write a history of all those places and all those peoples.

That sounds like a lifetime project.

I start with the Anglo and Latin founders of the city – after the actual Native American founders – and focus on communities such as the Filipinos, Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese and Iranians, whose communities were really linked to the way that Los Angeles reached out to the world. For instance, Los Angeles was a very important base for the Vietnam War. The second big prosecutor of that war was Richard Nixon, an Angeleno, representing the military-industrial complex, which was headquartered in L.A. I consider the large Vietnamese population, which is mostly in Orange County, to be the return tidal wave of our insertion of American power into Southeast Asia. Many times we get these émigré populations from the hot spots such as Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Korea, the Philippines, that were part of our global reach. If you’re going to tell the story of a global metropolis well, you need to follow the story around the globe. But it hasn’t been a lifetime. I started it 10 years ago and I’ll be finished this year.

You use all sorts of databases in your research, such as old L.A. utility grids, census cards and Herald Examiner morgue photos.

Yes, those are the kinds of collections we built into our USC digital archives. They have items in disparate formats that normally wouldn’t be searched together. When you search for a common place, you might bring up the Works Progress Administration (WPA) card that describes the house when it was built and whether it had running water in 1939, etc., plus a photograph taken by somebody else of the same place for some other purpose.

Your research includes fascinating insights on how the oil business in Los Angeles was linked to the Mexican revolution, how Hollywood exported its racial politics to Africa and dozens of other topics. Are there any subjects that interest you not at all?

There aren’t any. I love learning. That’s part of what’s great about my job. I’ve always been curious. But what I’m fascinated by is how it all fits together.

• Philip J. Ethington’s faculty profile
• Philip J. Ethington’s Web site
• To read a longer version of this interview, click here