A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America

by James Tejani, Jonathan Todd Ross (Read by)

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. 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.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic's destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. 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 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. Tejani vividly describes how a wild coast was made into the engine of American power. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth is must-listen for anyone who seeks to understand what the United States was, what it is now, and what it will be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798874851484
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	07/23/2024
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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.

Jonathan Todd Ross is a writer and an Earphones and Audie Award–winning voice actor. He has lent his voice to numerous anime television shows, including Yu-Gi-Oh! and Sonic X.

Editorial Reviews

"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

"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

"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

"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

"By returning the attention of historians to infrastructure…Tejani opens our eyes to a new way of thinking about the trans-Mississippi West."

Bancroft Prize jury

2024-05-23
A colorful study of the creation and development of the busiest port in the Western Hemisphere.

Many history books about California focus on San Francisco, the gold rush, and the transcontinental railroad, but Tejani, associate professor of history at California State University, focuses on the creation of the Los Angeles port, a tremendous undertaking. Although slavery preoccupied 1850s America, day-to-day politics featured a major effort to absorb the western conquests and connect them to the east with a railroad. Southern states blocked approval of any but a southern route through New Mexico and Arizona. Few readers know that a second, all-weather transcontinental railroad reached Southern California in 1881 or that a major Civil War campaign was fought in the Southwest after Texas Confederate forces invaded New Mexico in 1861. In response, a Union army landed at the Los Angeles port of San Pedro and endured a grueling march across the desert. Paying less attention than other scholars to the 1869 arrival of the (northern) transcontinental railroad, Tejani focuses closely on the following 50 years, during which California’s center of gravity moved south. Throughout the multifaceted narrative, he turns up an entertaining cast of mostly obscure political figures, entrepreneurs, military officers, and scientists who aimed to accomplish great things or simply line their pockets. Unlike San Francisco, San Pedro was not a natural harbor, but a great deal of commerce managed to pass though. By the 1870s, the railroads had arrived, local entrepreneurs were eager to share their bounty, and L.A. officials, bent on having a world-class port, worked hard and ultimately successfully to wrest control. This well-researched text, which often shifts perspectives, ends in the early 1900s. The author includes a generous selection of archival photos and a cast of characters.

A compelling regional history with relevance for U.S. history in general.

Kirkus Reviews