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

Winner of the 2025 Bancroft Prize "[An] enthralling debut…a beguiling history of Southern California, early industrial development, and U.S. empire." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) A deeply researched narrative of the creation of the Port of Los Angeles, a central event in America’s territorial expansion and rise as a global economic power. The Port of Los Angeles is all around us. Objects we use on a daily basis pass through it: furniture, apparel, electronics, automobiles, and much more. The busiest container port in the Western hemisphere, it claims one-sixth of all US ocean shipping. Yet despite its centrality to our world, the port and the story of its making have been neglected in histories of the United States. In A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth, historian James Tejani corrects that significant omission, charting the port’s rise out of the mud and salt marsh of San Pedro estuary—and showing how the story of the port is the story of modern, globalized America itself. By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had identified the West Coast as the republic’s destiny, a gateway to the riches of the Pacific. In a narrative spanning decades and stretching to Washington, DC, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia, Tejani demonstrates how San Pedro came to be seen as all-important to the nation’s future.