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

As the United States’ busiest harbors, the ports of San Pedro Bay connect Southern Californians to people and cultures across the globe. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, author James Tejani searches for the origin of San Pedro Bay’s power and finds it in the major events of nineteenth-century US history, most especially in westward expansion and the political conflict over slavery. In a narrative that spans decades and stretches to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas, the book demonstrates how San Pedro Bay came to be seen as all-important to the nation’s future – a safety-valve for its problems, a gateway to commercial wealth, and an object to be controlled and wielded.

That history began in the 1850s with the people and cultures of Los Angeles’s borderlands society. The region was home to indigenous survivors, Hispanic landowners, and recent settlers…