Description
Book SynopsisIn this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the US-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire.
Trade ReviewKim is deft in tying together the histories of Mexico, the US-Mexican borderlands, and the US West. This engaging and timely book is a welcome addition to the literature on these various subjects." - CHOICE
"An ambitious, highly original, and captivating study. Kim's wide range of U.S. and Mexican archival sources allows her to present a fine-grained contrapuntal history that carefully heeds the making, operating, and unmaking of empire on the ground in both Los Angeles and several Mexican regions. Written in a compelling, engaging style, it is is an outstanding history of Los Angeles that convincingly demonstrates thatthe "city of quartz" is also a city of empire." - H-Diplo
""Imperial Metropolis places Mexico at the center of a conversation on the changing state of American expansion, a historical reality that scholars of American empire—drawn to Hawaii and the Philippines in the 1890s—have generally missed. It will certainly spark new and important conversations related to the borderlands and Southern Californian historiography ... and explains how Los Angeles became a city with global reach and power via its unique history and positioning in the borderlands." - Diplomatic History
"Offers useful andthought-provoking insights for historians interested in imperialism, urban development, capitalism, and race, as well as for scholars of revolutionary Mexico and U.S.-Latin American relations." - Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
"Kim’s authoritative research in U.S. and Mexican archives will be useful for historians of empire, capitalism, race, the U.S.-Mexico border, and cities. Graduate seminars should be eager to use it as an exemplary model of a new type of borderlands history." - Connections: A Journal for Historians and Area Specialists
