The Los Angeles coastal area was inhabited by the Tongva (or Gabrieleños), Chumash, and earlier Native American nations for thousands of years. The first Europeans to arrive came in 1542, led by Juan Cabrillo, a Portuguese explorer who claimed the area for the Spanish Empire but did not stay. The next contact came 227 years later when Gaspar de Portolà, together with Franciscan padre Juan Crespi, reached the present site of Los Angeles on August 2, 1769.

In 1771, Father Junípero Serra had the Mission San Gabriel Arcángel built near Whittier Narrows in today's nearby San Gabriel Valley.^[3] On September 4, 1781, a group of 52 settlers from New Spain, set out from the San Gabriel mission to establish a settlement along the banks of the Porciúncula River^[4] (now Los Angeles River). These settlers were of Filipino,^[5]Indian and Spanish ancestry, of whom two-thirds were mestizo .^[6]

In 1777, the new governor of California, Felipe de Neve, recommended to the viceroy of New Spain that the site be developed into a pueblo (town). The area was duly named "El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula," ("The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels on the River Porciúncula"). It remained a small ranch town for decades, but by 1820 the population had increased to about 650 residents, making it the largest civilian (non mission) community in Spanish California. Today the outline of the Pueblo is preserved in a historic monument familiarly called Olvera Street, formerly Wine Street, which was named after Agustin Olvera.

New Spain achieved its independence from the Spanish Empire in 1821, and the pueblo continued as a part of Mexico. Mexican rule ended during the Mexican-American War, when Americans took control from the Californios after a series of battles that included; The Battle of San Pascual, the Battle of Dominguez Rancho, and ultimately, the Battle of Rio San Gabriel in 1847. The Treaty of Cahuenga, signed on January 13, 1847, ended hostilities in California, and in the later Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the Mexican government formally ceded Alta California and other territories to the United States. Europeans and Americans solidified control over the city after they immigrated into California during the California Gold Rush and secured the subsequent admission of California into the United States in 1850.

Railroads arrived when the Southern Pacific completed its line to Los Angeles in 1876. Oil was discovered in 1892, and by 1923 Los Angeles was supplying one-quarter of the world's petroleum. Even more important to the city's growth was water. In 1913, William Mulholland completed the aqueduct that assured the city's growth. In 1915, the City of Los Angeles began annexation of dozens of neighboring communities without water supplies of their own. A largely fictionalized account of the Owens Valley Water War can be found in the 1974 motion picture Chinatown.

In the 1920s the motion picture and aviation industries both flocked to Los Angeles and helped to further develop it. The city was the proud host of the 1932 Summer Olympics which saw the development of Baldwin Hills as the original Olympic Village. This period also saw the arrival of the exiles from the increasing pre-war tension in Europe, including such notables as Thomas Mann, Fritz Lang, Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Lion Feuchtwanger. World War II brought new growth and prosperity to the city, although many of its Japanese-American residents were transported to internment camps for the duration of the war. The postwar years saw an even greater boom as urban sprawl expanded into the San Fernando Valley.

The Watts riots in 1965 and Chicano High School "blowouts" along with the 1970 Chicano Moratorium showed the nation the deep racial divisions existing in the city. In 1969, Los Angeles was one of two "birthplaces" of the Internet, as the first ARPANET transmission was sent from UCLA to SRI in Menlo Park. In the 1980s Los Angeles was the center of the 80's Glam Metal scene with bands like W.A.S.P., Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Dokken, Quiet Riot & Van Halen playing their earliest concerts in Los Angeles nightclubs like the Rainbow Bar & Grill & The Starwood Club. The XXIII Olympiad was hosted in Los Angeles in 1984. The city was once again tested by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and in 2002, the attempted secession by the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood sections of the city which was defeated at the polls. Recently, urban redevelopment and gentrification have been taking place at a furious pace in various parts of the city, most notably Downtown.

Further reading

• Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies, University of California Press, 1971.

• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Vintage Books, 1992

• Torin Monahan, Los Angeles Studies: The Emergence of a Specialty Field, City & Society XIV (2): 155-184, 2002

• Lynell George, No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels, Verso, 1992

• Paul Glover, "Los Angeles: A History of the Future", Eco-Home Press, 1989

• Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory, Verso, 1997

• Leonard Pitt & Dale Pitt, Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County, University of California Press, 2000

• Peter Theroux, Translating LA: A Tour of the Rainbow City, Norton, 1994

• David L. Ulin (ed), Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, Library of America, 2002

• Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West, University of Oklahoma Press, 1991

• Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and its Disappearing Water, Penguin, 1986.