The new cross-disciplinary essay collection, A Companion to Los Angeles, edited by Professor William Deverell of USC, includes an entry by Leo Braudy on “Culture and Communities.”

According to the publisher:

A Companion to Los Angeles is a unique study of America’s second largest city and the first Companion devoted to a single metropolis. The volume consists of 25 essays, each an original contribution by a writer or scholar, which collectively assess the best and most important work to date on the complex history of Los Angeles. The structure of the Companion allows readers to view the emergence of long-term patterns within the history of Los Angeles. Instead of organizing the essays around discrete, time-specific events, the editors focus on critical themes and broad topics including demography, social unrest, politics, popular culture, architecture, and urban studies which span generations and disciplines. Three photographic portfolios, along with the “contemporary voice” essays that conclude each section, complement the historiographic chapters and provide a truly multidimensional view of the city. Together, the contributions constitute a lively and informed introduction to a history as fascinating as it is complex. The Companion will be an invaluable resource for scholars, students, and a general readership eager to situate the history of greater Los Angeles within a larger body of metropolitan studies and the history of the United States itself.

The book is available through Wiley and Amazon.

Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages, with an introduction by Leo Braudy, collects photographs and interviews with members of the Society of Creative Anachronism (SCA) conducted between 2003 and 2005 by fine art photographer E.F. Kitchen.

According to Kitchen:

The Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) is a group devoted to recreating the arts and activities of the Middle Ages in the present. One of their activities is to create large-scale mock wars, in which they wear period armor and engage in physically rigorous combat. Not content to stage polite mock battles, they meet by the thousands on vast fields, wearing full body armor and forcefully striking one another with rattan swords.

From 2003 to 2005, I photographed and interviewed heavy weapons fighters from the SCA on location at the sites where they reenact various battle scenarios. I present them to you here under their SCA names and personas.

To create these images, I used a large-format 8 x 10 camera and then made custom platinum prints from the original negatives. I chose antique photographic equipment and an archival printing method to achieve a look that would be impossible to create using a modern, point-and-shoot camera: the antique lenses have defects that make the images unique, and the platinum prints evoke a certain timelessness with their exceptional detail and rich, expanded tonal scale.

View sample images from the book at Kitchen’s website.

You can purchase a copy through Amazon and Powerhouse Books.