The Los Angeles earthquakes of July, 1920

1921 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-79
Author(s):  
Stephen Taber

Summary More than a hundred earthquakes have been recorded in southern California during the period February-September, 1920. These earthquakes have originated along several different faults in the vicinity of Los Angeles, but all of them are believed to have resulted from the adjustment of stresses set up in the region by the same general tectonic movements. The series of shocks felt in Los Angeles on July 16th originated along faults which cut Miocene and Pliocene rocks in the northern part of the city. The three strongest shocks on July 16th had epicentral intensities of between VI and VII in the Rossi-Forel scale; and they were felt over areas of from 500 to 2500 square miles. The known seismic history of southern California and the magnitude of the post-Pleistocene movements both indicate that the seismicity of the region is relatively high. There are many faults in the vicinity of Los Angeles; some of which are known to be active, while others are suspected of being active. Fortunately those within the city are short, while the longer ones are seven to thirty miles away, and are therefore less dangerous in so far as Los Angeles is concerned.

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-86
Author(s):  
David Lau

This essay is a review of two recent books of criticism: Bill Mohr's account of the Los Angeles poetry scene and Ignacio Lopez-Calvo's account of recent film and fiction set in Latino L.A. The essay argues for a conception of L.A. rooted in understanding the political and economic history of the city, and concludes with some speculation on the future of cultural production in the southern California region.


1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-49
Author(s):  
Dana Osborne

AbstractThis analysis examines the ways in which a single speaker, Ana, born in mid-century East Los Angeles, organizes and reflects upon her experiences of the city through language. Ana’s story is one that sheds light on the experiences of many Mexican Americans who came of age at a critical time in a transitioning L.A., and the slow move of people who had been up until mid-century relegated largely in and around racially and socioeconomically segregated parts of L.A. These formative experiences are demonstrated to have informed the ways that speakers parse the social and geographical landscape along several dimensions, and this analysis interrogates the symbolic value of a special category of everyday language, deixis, to reveal the intersection between language and social experience in the cityscape of L.A. In this way, it is analytically possible to not only approach the habituation and reproduction of specific deictic fields as indexical of the ways that speakers parse the city, but also to demonstrate the ways in which key moments in the history of the city have shaped the emergence and meaning of those fields.


2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-11
Author(s):  
Adam Rogers

The city of Los Angeles is converting its streetlights from orange-gold sodium vapor technology to cold, white light-emitting diodes. It’s a transition that will change the color of the city at night, in a place with a long history of experimentation with artificial lighting technology. That means not only that the city will appear different, but it will no longer correspond to memories of its coloration, or to its depictions in famous films.


Author(s):  
Jessica M. Kim

This chapter explores how, as Los Angeles capitalists embarked on investment ventures and urban-imperial expansion across Mexico, they extended concepts of race and labor forged in Los Angeles to build networks for investment and to control their Mexican workforce. They channelled a history of working with California’s Mexican American elite into productive partnerships with president Porfirio Díaz and other Mexican elites. Los Angeles investors also applied ideas about race and labor developed in Southern California to their investments in Mexico. These ideas were also linked to their perspective on race and American empire-building around the globe. Anglo-American investors in Los Angeles believed that a hierarchy of race justified their labor system in Southern California as well as imperial exploits around the globe. These investors included William Rosecrans; Harrison Gray Otis, owner of the Los Angeles Times; Senator Thomas Bard; and oil baron Edward Doheny. They believed that Mexican land, resources, and labor could be drawn into Los Angeles’s commercial orbit in the form of a racialized labor system and “informal” empire.


Author(s):  
Gregory J. Snyder

This chapter offers a brief history of the subculture and introduces readers to skateboarding practices. There is a detailed description of tricks and a discussion of how skateboarding forces a reexamination of classic urban sociology by focusing on the specific history of the growth of Los Angeles. In doing so we come to appreciate not only how skateboarding changes one’s perception of urban space, but also how skaters’ cognitive maps of the city offer a critique of classic Chicago School sociology.


Author(s):  
Brian Cross

This chapter traces the history of Brazilian music in Los Angeles, covering the journey of the collation of rhythms known as samba into the rest of the Americas, to the emergence of bossa nova as a major cultural force, to the post-bossa Brazilian sound in the United States. It argues that as music moves, it operates according to its own logic. Influences are fluid: a bossa nova rhythm can morph easily into a second line, a two step can slide into a samba, and writing music is, thankfully, a far more interesting way to write history than history writing. But it is undeniable that, since the late 1930s, the language, swing, and palette of Brazilian music have influenced the world and changed music in the city of Los Angeles profoundly, while very few of us noticed.


1996 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Arcila

Located in the extreme northwestern part of the Los Coconucos volcanic chain in the Central Cordillera, the Purace is one of Colombia's most active volcanoes. Recent geological studies indicate an eruptive history of mainly explosive behavior which was marked most recently by a minor ash eruption in 1977. Techniques used to forecast the renewal of activity of volcanoes after a long period of quiescence include the monitoring of seismicity and ground deformation near the volcano. As a first approach toward the monitoring of the Purace volcano, Southwest Seismological Observatory (OSSO), located in the city of Cali, set up one seismic station in 1986. Beginning in June 1991, the seismic signals have also been transmitted to the Colombian Geological Survey (INGEOMINAS) at the Volcanological and Seismological Observatory (OVS-UOP), located in the city of Popayan. Two more seismic stations were installed early in 1994 forming a minimum seismic network and a geodetic monitoring program for ground deformation studies was established and conducted by INGEOMINAS.


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