Today Los Angeles is the nation's second-largest city, a sprawling metropolis of nearly 4 million residents that prides itself as the country's cultural capital, as a vibrant commercial hub, and as a beacon of diversity and multiculturalism. In the late nineteenth century, however, Los Angeles was a blank slate, a small city on the edge of the expanding American empire. It was during this period that a once-small Spanish settlement began to occupy an important place in the imaginations of ambitious Anglo settlers, as the conclusion of the Mexican-American War turned largely neglected Mexican territories into important American possessions and as the end of the Civil War opened the West for white settlers and commercial interests. As Jessica M. Kim puts it in her important new book Imperial Metropolis, in the postbellum period, the city of Los Angeles became a major “prize” for Anglo capitalists.
Kim skillfully traces this...
