Settlement of southern California began long before America's triumphant march westward from the Atlantic coast, as evidenced by the interconnected lives of three people who lived through California's transition from native land to Spanish colony and from Mexican province to American state.

Before Hollywood, Los Angeles was a real frontier town of gunslingers, lynch mobs, and locomotives. L.A. has been reckoning with that past by examining hanging trees, the massacre of eighteen Chinese immigrants in 1971 near what is now Olvera Street, and railroad promotional campaigns depicting Los Angeles as paradise.

Wood, iron, steel, concrete: these materials gave form to Los Angeles and shaped its identity in the national imagination. But what of the city's cultural legacy and the environmental costs of its relentless growth?

Filmmaker Lois Weber rose to greatness in a nascent film industry that was open to women in creative leadership positions, while the Central Casting Bureau placed minorities in background roles and white actors in leading parts.

Two underground guidebooks -- The Negro Travelers' Green Book and The Address Book -- reveal the hidden geographies many Angelenos had to navigate, exposing Los Angeles as a place of coded segregation and resistance.

Americans have long looked at the California shore and seen the end of the continent, but that sandy edge is the beginning of a Pacific world -- one that has long influenced Los Angeles through not only geology and climate, but also the transoceanic flows of people, goods, technology, and cultural ideas.