Overview

The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary—and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic’s destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation’s future. It was not virgin land, but dominated by powerful Mexican estates that would not be dislodged easily. Yet American scientists, including the great surveyor George Davidson, imperialist politicians such as Jefferson Davis and William Gwin, and hopeful land speculators, among them the future Union Army general Edward Ord, would wrest control of the estuary, and set the scene for the violence, inequality, and engineering marvels to come. San Pedro was no place for a harbor, Tejani reveals. The port was carved in defiance of nature, using new engineering techniques and massive mechanical dredgers. Business titans such as Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman brought their money and corporate influence to the task. But they were outmatched by government reformers, laying the foundations for the port, for the modern city of Los Angeles, and for our globalized world. Interweaving the natural history of San Pedro into this all-too-human history, Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A story of imperial dreams and personal ambition, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is necessary reading for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.

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9781324093558

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Reviews

"""[An] enthralling debut…a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""Weaving the many threads of Indigenous, environmental, maritime, political, and economic history, James Tejani shows how a local story became one of national and global proportions. With shifting perspectives and deep dives, Tejani excavates the unlikely nineteenth-century rise of the Port of Los Angeles as a crucial, though relatively unknown, chapter in America’s ascent to world power. Well researched and finely crafted, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of the nation as well as the West, and it will surely be of interest to scholars in multiple fields."" -- Steven Hahn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Illiberal America: A History ""This remarkable book is a major contribution to the history of California and, more broadly, to the economic and political transformations unleashed during the Civil War era. It transcends the boundaries that too often separate subfields of history, bringing together national and international events and political, economic, and environmental processes. If you wish to understand not only the rise of the port of Los Angeles, but the roots of American empire itself, this is the place to begin."" -- Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize ""In a work reflecting both a deep dive into obscure archives and a masterful crafting of historical analysis and narrative, Tejani weaves a complex story of conquest, expansion, exploration, nature, technology, trade, and diplomacy, peopled by indigenous Native Americans, Spanish missionaries and ranchers, American soldiers, scientists, swindlers, labor radicals, capitalist empire builders, and civic reformers. The development of a few square miles of Southern California coastline, in Tejani’s telling, becomes the story of America’s Pacific destiny."" -- Maurice Isserman, Professor of History at Hamilton College and author of Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering ""James Tejani’s meticulously researched and brilliantly told book places one of the truly transformative enterprises of California’s development within the grand sweep of the state’s—and America’s—historical pageant. Specialists, students of history, and general readers alike will be fascinated by this sprawling narrative of how capitalists, political operators, and swindlers managed over the course of a century to turn a muddy bay on the Pacific shore into a behemoth of international commerce."" -- Michael Hiltzik, author of Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America"

"""Weaving the many threads of Indigenous, environmental, maritime, political, and economic history, James Tejani shows how a local story became one of national and global proportions. With shifting perspectives and deep dives, Tejani excavates the unlikely nineteenth-century rise of the Port of Los Angeles as a crucial, though relatively unknown, chapter in America’s ascent to world power. Well researched and finely crafted, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of the nation as well as the West, and it will surely be of interest to scholars in multiple fields."" -- Steven Hahn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Illiberal America: A History ""This remarkable book is a major contribution to the history of California and, more broadly, to the economic and political transformations unleashed during the Civil War era. It transcends the boundaries that too often separate subfields of history, bringing together national and international events and political, economic, and environmental processes. If you wish to understand not only the rise of the port of Los Angeles, but the roots of American empire itself, this is the place to begin."" -- Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize ""In a work reflecting both a deep dive into obscure archives and a masterful crafting of historical analysis and narrative, Tejani weaves a complex story of conquest, expansion, exploration, nature, technology, trade, and diplomacy, peopled by indigenous Native Americans, Spanish missionaries and ranchers, American soldiers, scientists, swindlers, labor radicals, capitalist empire builders, and civic reformers. The development of a few square miles of Southern California coastline, in Tejani’s telling, becomes the story of America’s Pacific destiny."" -- Maurice Isserman, Professor of History at Hamilton College and author of Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering ""James Tejani’s meticulously researched and brilliantly told book places one of the truly transformative enterprises of California’s development within the grand sweep of the state’s—and America’s—historical pageant. Specialists, students of history, and general readers alike will be fascinated by this sprawling narrative of how capitalists, political operators, and swindlers managed over the course of a century to turn a muddy bay on the Pacific shore into a behemoth of international commerce."" -- Michael Hiltzik, author of Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America"

"""[An] enthralling debut…a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire."" -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) ""Weaving the many threads of Indigenous, environmental, maritime, political, and economic history, James Tejani shows how a local story became one of national and global proportions. With shifting perspectives and deep dives, Tejani excavates the unlikely nineteenth-century rise of the Port of Los Angeles as a crucial, though relatively unknown, chapter in America’s ascent to world power. Well researched and finely crafted, A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is a significant contribution to our understanding of the development of the nation as well as the West, and it will surely be of interest to scholars in multiple fields."" -- Steven Hahn, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Illiberal America: A History ""This remarkable book is a major contribution to the history of California and, more broadly, of the economic and political transformations unleashed during the Civil War era. It transcends the boundaries that too often separate subfields of history, bringing together national and international events and political, economic, and environmental processes. If you wish to understand not only the rise of the Port of Los Angeles, but the roots of American empire itself, this is the place to begin."" -- Eric Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, winner of the Pulitzer Prize ""In a work reflecting both a deep dive into obscure archives and a masterful crafting of historical analysis and narrative, Tejani weaves a complex story of conquest, expansion, exploration, nature, technology, trade, and diplomacy, peopled by indigenous Native Americans, Spanish missionaries and ranchers, American soldiers, scientists, swindlers, labor radicals, capitalist empire builders, and civic reformers. The development of a few square miles of Southern California coastline, in Tejani’s telling, becomes the story of America’s Pacific destiny."" -- Maurice Isserman, Professor of History at Hamilton College and author of Continental Divide: A History of American Mountaineering ""James Tejani’s meticulously researched and brilliantly told book places one of the truly transformative enterprises of California’s development within the grand sweep of the state’s—and America’s—historical pageant. Specialists, students of history, and general readers alike will be fascinated by this sprawling narrative of how capitalists, political operators, and swindlers managed over the course of a century to turn a muddy bay on the Pacific shore into a behemoth of international commerce."" -- Michael Hiltzik, author of Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America"

Author Information

James Tejani grew up on San Pedro Bay and earned his PhD from Columbia University. He has received fellowships from the Huntington Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is an associate professor of history at California State University.

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