As hubs of trade and transportation, cities have long served as central nodes in not only global exchanges of people and products but also as key points in the development of imperial power.

Drawing from the history of Los Angeles, Jessica M. Kim explores urban and imperial expansionism in the context of U.S.-Mexico relations. She analyzes how Los Angeles investors transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. She’ll also discuss her current work, which explores the broader histories of the growth of American cities and the concurrent expansion of American global and imperial power.

Jessica Kim is a professor of history at California State University, Northridge. She is the author of Imperial Metropolis: Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Borderlands of American Empire, 1865-1941 (University of North Carolina, 2019). The book was the 2020 co-winner of the Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book from the Urban History Association and a finalist for the David J. Weber Prize from the Western History Association. She is currently working on a short history of American empire and American cities for the Global Urban History series at Cambridge University Press.

This event is in-person and also available via Zoom.