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6 Episodes 2017 - 2017
Episode 1
Tue, Oct 10, 201727 mins
American history has long been told as a triumphant march westward from the Atlantic coast, but in southern California, our history stretches back further in time. This show explores the interconnected lives of three people who lived through California's transition from native land to Spanish colony and from to Mexican province to American state. Featuring the stories of native teacher Toypurina, who led the revolt against the San Gabriel Mission, Spanish soldier Jose Marco Pico, who served at the mission, and his son Pio Pico, who became the last Mexican Governor of California.
Episode 2
Tue, Oct 17, 201726 mins
Long before Hollywood imagined the Wild West, Los Angeles was a real frontier town of gunslingers, lynch mobs, and smoke-belching locomotives. This show examines L.A.'s efforts to reckon with its violent past by examining hanging trees and remnants of vigilant justice; the massacre of eighteen Chinese immigrants that took place in 1871 near what is now Olvera Street; and railroad promotional campaigns that painted a picture of Los Angeles as a verdant paradise.
Episode 3
Tue, Oct 24, 201725 mins
Redwood, iron, concrete - these are the materials that gave form to Los Angeles and shaped its identity in the national imagination. This show also questions the cultural legacy and environmental costs of the city's relentless growth.
Episode 4
Tue, Nov 7, 201724 mins
Los Angeles is often identified with Hollywood, but there's more to the entertainment industry than its facade of movie stars and blockbuster films. The first segment explores the career of Lois Weber, a filmmaker who rose to greatness in a nascent film industry that welcomed women into creative leadership positions. However, when it became a big business, it was less open to women and their place in early Hollywood history was all but erased. The second segment examines the history of the Central Casting Bureau which capitalized on the city's segregated ethnic enclaves to find "racial types" when filling background roles, while white actors were cast in leading roles, and discusses the lingering legacy of minority underrepresentation in the film industry.
Episode 5
Tue, Nov 14, 201725 mins
What if the stories Los Angeles told about itself relegated you to the margins? This show explores two underground guidebooks that reveal the hidden geographies many Angelenos had to navigate, exposing Los Angeles as a place of coded segregation and resistance. First, Victor Green's "Negro Motorist Green Book" guided African-American travelers of the 1930s to 1960s through Jim Crow-era America, and to L.A., helping them avoid danger and find establishments that gladly accepted their business such as service stations, restaurants, hotels, barber shops, drug stores, and nightclubs. The second guidebook, simply known as "The Address Book," was first published in 1965 by Bob Damron. Its lists of restaurants, bars, and nightclubs gave hope to gays in L.A., a city more intolerant than accepting, by fleshing out underground worlds that would've otherwise remained unknowable.
Episode 6
Tue, Nov 21, 201726 mins
Americans have long looked at the California shore and seen the end of the continent. Instead, this show interprets that sandy edge as the beginning of a Pacific world - one that has long influenced Los Angeles through geology and climate, but also through the transoceanic flows of people, goods, technology and cultural ideas.