Review Essays
Historicizing the City of Angels

Scholars of the urban condition working in various disciplines—ranging from history and geography to architecture and city planning—have become increasingly interested of late in Los Angeles, especially the form it began to take toward the end of the twentieth century. Did this constitute a new type of urban center? If so, what does this say about the shape of American and global patterns of urban history and urban development? And is it meaningful to speak of an emerging "L.A. School" of urban theory, which has a distinctive approach to important issues due to its members being located in and concerned with the City of Angels? These are the kinds of questions addressed in the recent interdisciplinary collection of essays that the three contributors to this section comment on from a trio of different perspectives. The section begins with a piece by Robert A. Schneider, who has done a great deal of work on the ceremonial and other aspects of the city of Toulouse in the early modern era. He explores the issue of whether too much is made, in analysis of contemporary Los Angeles, of ruptures with the past. This is followed by a contribution from California historian Michael E. Engh that surveys those aspects of L.A.'s social and cultural history that are typically placed at the center in works by members of the "L.A. School," as well as the topics (such as the actions of certain kinds of religious and secular community organizations) that tend to be underemphasized or ignored. The section closes—at least, the print version of it does—with an exploration of methodological, theoretical, and comparative issues by Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, writing from the perspective of an urban historian of Africa who is based in Paris. Although the AHR's discussion of the City of Angels ends here, the e-AHR continues with a multimedia text by Philip J. Ethington, accessible at www.historycooperative.org, that includes digitized animated maps and other materials, as well as an essay on epistemology and the history of urban centers.

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