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Los Angeles is often associated with Hollywood, freeways, beaches, and modern city life, but its history reaches far beyond the twentieth century. For California teachers, Los Angeles offers opportunities to explore Indigenous history, Spanish and Mexican California, migration, architecture, neighborhoods, transportation, cultural change, and the growth of one of America’s largest metropolitan areas. One of my favorite resources for helping students investigate this history is HistoricPlacesLA, an online inventory created by the City of Los Angeles to document and map significant historic and cultural resources throughout the city.
Explore Los Angeles Through Historic Places
HistoricPlacesLA allows students and teachers to explore thousands of documented historic resources throughout Los Angeles. Users can search for individual buildings, historic districts, neighborhoods, architectural styles, cultural landmarks, bridges, parks, landscapes, and places associated with important people and events. Students can move around the interactive map, search by address or keyword, and open individual resource reports to learn when a place was built, why it may be historically significant, and whether it has received historic designation.
A Free Resource for Classroom Inquiry
Try asking students to select a neighborhood, building, landmark, or historic site and investigate what the resource reveals about Los Angeles at a particular moment in time. Students can then develop questions, compare locations, create timelines, or connect the site to larger themes in California history.
Los Angeles Has Many Layers of History
Long before Los Angeles became a modern city, the region had a rich natural and human history. Ice Age animals such as mammoths and saber-toothed cats once lived in the Los Angeles Basin, leaving evidence that can still be studied at the La Brea Tar Pits. The region was also home to Indigenous peoples for thousands of years before European colonization. The Tongva and other Native communities developed sophisticated societies, trade networks, languages, traditions, and relationships with the land long before the establishment of Spanish missions and settlements. Later chapters include Mission San Gabriel, the founding and development of El Pueblo de Los Ángeles, Mexican California, American statehood, immigration, transportation, architecture, industry, and the extraordinary population growth that transformed Los Angeles into a major metropolis.
Turn Historic Places Into Classroom Investigations
A historic-place database can become much more than a reference website. Students might investigate questions such as:
What does a historic building reveal about the people who lived or worked in a neighborhood?
How has a Los Angeles neighborhood changed over time?
Why are some places preserved while others disappear?
How do architecture and landscapes reflect changes in culture, technology, transportation, or economics?
Whose stories are represented in historic preservation—and whose stories may require additional research?
SOC 903
Historic Los Angeles: Reflections on Its Heritage
If you would like to explore Los Angeles history in greater depth, SOC 903 takes educators through the people, places, cultures, and events that shaped the region. Course topics include Indigenous history, the La Brea Tar Pits, Mission San Gabriel, El Pueblo de Los Ángeles, influential historical figures, historic places, biographies, literature, and classroom applications. The course is completed online through a flexible independent-study format and provides three graduate-level professional development credits through Fresno Pacific University’s Center for Professional Development.
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Discover the Stories Behind the City
Historic places can help students see that history happened in real communities, buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes. Exploring Los Angeles through these places can turn California history into an investigation of the people and stories that shaped the city—and continue to shape it today.
Continue Your Learning
Discover Historic Los AngelesContinue exploring the people and places of Southern California with SOC 903: Historic Los Angeles, an online continuing education course created for educators. EXPLORE SOC 903 →Use code WINTER45 to save $15.
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Jeromy Winter
Learn more about the History of California by signing up for one of my courses at Fresno Pacific University. 
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