Electrifying Los Angeles

This term we will be exploring the meteoric rise of modern Los Angeles through two lenses: the history of its energy infrastructure and of our own institution, Caltech. These two histories intertwine in multiple ways, in the form of big personalities, grand ambitions, and feats of technical bravado. But innumerable smaller, less-visible parts of Caltech and Southern California history also play vital roles in the shaping of this region and our home institution. To trace these stories, large and small, we will be turning to the Caltech Archives and the digital collections of The Huntington Library. You will be learning how to research and communicate the history of archival objects, culminating in a final “group exhibition” of your curated pieces.

Schedule of Class Topics and Readings

• January 8: Caltech and Its Archives

  • Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), 54–62.

• January 15: Thinking Critically About Infrastructure

  • Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Daedelus 190 (1980): 121–136.

• January 22: Electrifying America

  • David E. Nye, Electrifying America: Social Meanings of a New Technology, 1880–1940 (MIT Press, 1992), 85–137.
  • Explore the Southern California Edison Photographs and Negatives via the Huntington Digital Library. Spend at least 30 minutes exploring images, and select one to share with the group via Ed. In your post, provide a link to your chosen and describe what interests you about it.

• January 29: Big Creek and the High Voltage Research Laboratory

  • Donald C. Jackson, Building the Ultimate Dam: John S. Eastman and the Control of Water in the West (University Press of Kansas, 1995), 59–83.
  • Etienne Benson, “Generating Infrastructural Invisibility: Insulation, Interconnection, and Avian Excrement in the Southern California Power Grid,” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 103–130.

• February 5: Gordon Kaufmann at Caltech

  • Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Designing for the Genders: Curricula and Architecture at Scripps College and the California Institute of Technology,” Pacific Historical Review 54 (1985): 439–461.

• February 12: Hoover Dam and the Technological Sublime

  • Joan Didion, “At the Dam” (1970), in The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979).
  • David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994), 133–142.
  • Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–78.

• February 19: Electric Los Angeles

  • Daniel L. Wuebben, Power Lined: Electricity, Landscape, and the American Mind (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), 87–129.
  • Visit from Prof. Brian Jacobson.

• February 26

  • No class: independent Archives visits

• March 4: Chinatown screening

• March 5: River Futures

  • Ellie Robins, “The Los Angeles River is Your Brain” (2021).
  • Visit from Dr. Nick Earhart.