James Tejani (PhD 2009) has published A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America

James Tejani (PhD 2009) has published A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America (W. W. Norton, July 2024), which explores how America’s global gateway – the busiest container port in the Western hemisphere – came to be from mud and salt marsh. The tale spans to Washington, DC, New York City, the Pacific Northwest, Civil War Richmond, Southwest deserts, and even overseas to Europe, Hawaii, and Asia as it follows Mexican ranchers, US frontier explorers, imperialist politicians like Jefferson Davis and Theodore Roosevelt, land speculators (among them Civil War general Edward Ord), and railroad titans like Collis Huntington and Edward H. Harriman.