Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles traces the improbable rise of Los Angeles through the prism of six visionaries who had outsize influence on the city’s growth: Phineas Banning, Harrison Gray Otis, Henry Huntington, Harry Chandler, William Mulholland, and Moses Sherman. In the late 1870s, Los Angeles was a violent, dusty, 29-square-mile pueblo with a few thousand souls, largely unchanged since its founding in 1781. By 1930, its size had swelled to within 96% of its current 468 square miles, housing a staggering 1.2 million people. In just 50 years, L.A. had joined the ranks of other world-class cities. In the tradition of Mike Davis’s classic work City of Quartz, Paul Haddad (Freewaytopia and 10,000 Steps a Day in L.A.) debunks many myths about the City of Angels with a wildly entertaining narrative that sheds new light on the fascinating birth of modern Los Angeles. Power came from a select few, whose triumphs, scandals, and correspondence are well documented in Inventing Paradise, along with other little-known facts about L.A. history, including: How Los Angeles Times chief Harry Chandler pushed eugenics and endorsed “white spots” Henry Huntington’s and Moses Sherman’s trolley systems and the extortion-type practices that led to their expansion When Los Angeles was so desperate for water, it hired a miracle worker who promised rain How L.A.’s power elite peddled the lie that the Owens River used to flow into Los Angeles and rightfully belonged to the city When Los Angeles annexed a city in which monkeys cast votes How Venice, California, was not the first Venice, California William Mulholland’s game-changing construction of the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which raised the city’s population ceiling from 250,000 to 2.5 million Haddad also covers the heavy costs that came with creating paradise in such a short period of time, including car dependency, environmental problems, and deep-seated inequities between wealthy white Angelenos and people of color due to racist policies. All have left an imprint on present-day Los Angeles. Los Angeles is known as a city that should not exist—and yet it does. Through Inventing Paradise, Haddad shows readers that Los Angeles is not a paradise found, but a paradise that was willed into existence, owing to the collective vision of these six Gilded Era-born tycoons.

The rise and fall of William Mulholland, and the story of L.A.’s disastrous dam collapse: “A dramatic saga of ambition, politics, money and betrayal” (Los Angeles Daily News). Rivers in the Desert follows the remarkable career of William Mulholland, the visionary who engineered the rise of Los Angeles as the greatest American city west of the Mississippi. He sought to transform the sparse and barren desert into an inhabitable environment by designing the longest aqueduct in the Western Hemisphere, bringing water from the mountains to support a large city. This “fascinating history” chronicles Mulholland’s dramatic ascension to wealth and fame—followed by his tragic downfall after the sudden collapse of the dam he had constructed to safeguard the water supply (Newsweek). The disaster, which killed at least five hundred people, caused his repudiation by allies, friends, and a previously adoring community. Epic in scope, Rivers in the Desert chronicles the history of Los Angeles and examines the tragic fate of the man who rescued it. “An arresting biography of William Mulholland, the visionary Los Angeles Water Department engineer . . . [his] personal and public dramas make for gripping reading.” —Publishers Weekly “A fascinating look at the political maneuvering and engineering marvels that moved the City of Angels into the first rank of American cities.” —Booklist

"Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times" is the tale of the Chandlers family's reign over L.A. with the help of their mighty scepter, the Times, and their entwinement with politics, family feud, and fortune. This is truly the story of the buildingo

This book explores the process by which the French Basque country acquired a folkloric regional identity in the long nineteenth century. It argues that, despite its origins in pre-modern customs, this stereotypical identity was invented as part of France’s process of nation-building. The abolition of privileges in 1789 prompted a new interest in local culture as the defining feature of provincial France, shaping the transition from the pre-‘modern’ province to the ‘modern’ region. The relationship between the region and the nation, however, was difficult. Regional culture favoured the integration of the French Basque provinces into the French nation-state but also challenged the authority of the central state. As a result, Basque region-building reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the unitary model of French nationhood, in the nineteenth century as well as today.

2023 ALAA Book Award, Association for Latin American Art/Arvey Foundation A fascinating account of the modern reinvention of the image of the Indian in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture, seen through the work of Peruvian painter Francisco Laso. One of the outstanding painters of the nineteenth century, Francisco Laso (1823–1869) set out to give visual form to modern Peru. His solemn and still paintings of indigenous subjects were part of a larger project, spurred by writers and intellectuals actively crafting a nation in the aftermath of independence from Spain. In this book, at once an innovative account of modern indigenism and the first major monograph on Laso, Natalia Majluf explores the rise of the image of the Indian in literature and visual culture. Reading Laso’s works through a broad range of sources, Majluf traces a decisive break in a long history of representations of indigenous peoples that began with the Spanish conquest. She ties this transformation to the modern concept of culture, which redefined both the artistic field and the notion of indigeneity. As an abstraction produced through indigenist discourse, an icon of authenticity, and a densely racialized cultural construct, the Indian would emerge as a central symbol of modern Andean nationalisms. Inventing Indigenism brings the work and influence of this extraordinary painter to the forefront as it offers a broad perspective on the dynamics of art and visual culture in nineteenth-century Latin America.

This study examines the history behind an idea: a new polity of "Greater Lebanon". It shows how, under the powerful influence of the French Mandate, various groups of the local elite attempted to create what amounted to a new Lebanese nationalism, carving the state into Maronite Christian, Sunni and Shiite power bases. The results only accentuated the divisions already inherent in this multi-ethnic and multi-faith society, and were to pave the way for the instability and wars that have plagued the country ever since.

Named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR An NPR Best Book of the Year, exploring the impact of Latinos’ new collective racial identity on the way Americans understand race, with a new afterword by the author Who are Latinos and where do they fit in America’s racial order? In this “timely and important examination of Latinx identity” (Ms.), Laura E. Gómez, a leading critical race scholar, argues that it is only recently that Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, Central Americans, and others are seeing themselves (and being seen by others) under the banner of a cohesive racial identity. And the catalyst for this emergent identity, she argues, has been the ferocity of anti-Latino racism. In what Booklist calls “an incisive study of history, complex interrogation of racial construction, and sophisticated legal argument,” Gómez “packs a knockout punch” (Publishers Weekly), illuminating for readers the fascinating race-making, unmaking, and re-making processes that Latinos have undergone over time, indelibly changing the way race functions in this country. Building on the “insightful and well-researched” (Kirkus Reviews) material of the original, the paperback features a new afterword in which the author analyzes results of the 2020 Census, providing brilliant, timely insight about how Latinos have come to self-identify.