La

LA-VT  Vientiane prefecture

Provinces (16)

LA-AT  Attapeu
LA-BK  Bokeo
LA-BL  Borikhamxay
LA-CH  Champassack 
LA-HO  Houaphan
LA-KH  Khammouane
LA-LM  Louang Namtha
LA-LP  Louang Phabang
LA-OU  Oudomxay
LA-PH  Phongsaly
LA-SL  Saravane
LA-SV  Savannakhet
LA-VI  Vientiane
LA-XA  Sayaboury
LA-XE  Xekong
LA-XI  Xieng Khouang

Special zone (1)

LA-XN  Saysomboun

• ISO 3166-2, the reference table for all country region codes.
• ISO 3166-1, the reference table for all country codes, as used for domain names on the internet.

• Carbon lighting applications, especially by the motion picture industry for studio lighting and projection.
• La₂O₃ improves the alkali resistance of glass, and is used in making special optical glasses, such as:
  • Infrared absorbing glass.
  • Camera and telescope lenses, because of the high refractive index and low dispersion of rare-earth glasses.
• Small amounts of lanthanum added to steel improves its malleability, resistance to impact and ductility.
• Small amounts of lanthanum added to iron helps to produce nodular cast iron.
• Small amounts of lanthanum added to molybdenum decreases the hardness of this metal and its sensitivity to temperature variations.
• Mischmetal, a pyrophoric alloy used e.g. in lighter flints, contains 25% to 45% lanthanum.
• The oxide and the boride are used in electronic vacuum tubes.
• Hydrogen sponge alloys can contain lanthanum. These alloys are capable of storing up to 400 times their own volume of hydrogen gas in a reversible adsorption process.
• Petroleum cracking catalysts.
• Gas lantern mantles.
• Glass and lapidary polishing compound.
• La-Ba age dating of rocks and ores.

History

The word lanthanum comes from the Greek lanthanein, to lie hidden.

The element is not absorbed orally, and when injected its elimination is very slow. Lanthanum carbonate is being studied as a compound to absorb excess phosphate in cases of end-stage renal failure. Some rare-earth chlorides, such as lanthanum chloride (LaCl₃), are known to have anticoagulant properties.

Compounds

The isotopes of lanthanum range in atomic weight from 120 amu (120-La) to 152 amu (152-La).

Early history

On September 4, 1781 44 "pobladores", recruited from northern Mexico to help cement Spain's control over Alta California, founded the town. Only two of these settlers identified as Spaniards; the rest came primarily of African or Indian descent. The small town received the name El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles de la Porciuncula, "The Town of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of the Small Portion". Located on the Los Angeles River, the town became a cattle ranching center.

Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821 did not change life in Los Angeles, other than to allow the secularization of the missions: land grants distributed the mission properties to rancheros.

Manifest Destiny reached California at the time of the Mexican-American War (1846 - 1848). On 18 June 1846 a small group of Yankees raised the California Bear Flag and declared independence from Mexico. United States troops quickly took control of the presidios at Monterey and San Francisco and proclaimed the Conquest complete. In Southern California, the Mexicans for a time repelled American troops, but Los Angeles eventually fell to Commodore Robert F. Stockton. The United States and Mexico signed the Treaty of Capitulation at Cahuenga Pass on January 13, 1847.

April 4, 1850 saw the incorporation of Los Angeles as a city. At the same time, the old landowners started to lose their lands. Compelled to secure confirmation of their land grants in U.S. courts, ten percent of the bona fide land owners of Los Angeles County had to move off their land and became reduced to bankruptcy. The more fortunate rancheros finally lost their special status as "Californios" and became absorbed into other communities, depending on their wealth or color.

Other Mexican residents resisted the new Anglo powers by resorting to social banditry against the gringos. In 1856 Juan Flores threatened Southern California with a full-scale Mexican revolt. He was hanged in Los Angeles in front of 3,000 spectators. Tiburcio Vasquez, a legend in his own time among the Mexican population for his daring feats against the Anglos, was captured and hanged on La Cienega Boulevard in 1874.

Angelenos set out to remake their geography in order to challenge San Francisco with its port facilities, railway terminal, banks and factories. Harrison Gray Otis, founder and owner of the Los Angeles Times, and his allies embarked on reshaping southern California by creating a harbor at San Pedro with federal dollars.

This put them at loggerheads with Collis P. Huntington, president of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company and the most ruthless of California's "Big Four" robber barons, who was pushing for a port at Santa Monica. The San Pedro forces prevailed and work on the San Pedro breakwater began in 1899 and was finished in 1910. In order to guarantee that Angelenos would control the harbor, Otis and his allies secured a change in state law in 1909 that allowed Los Angeles to absorb San Pedro and Wilmington.

With a fundamental belief in limitless growth as the key to happiness and prosperity, Angelenos also began to cast about for a new source of water. Two hundred and fifty miles northeast of Los Angeles in Inyo County, near the Nevada line, a long slender desert region known as the Owens Valley had one freakish, inexhaustible, priceless treasure: down through the center of this arid valley ran the Owens River, a permanent stream of fresh water fed by the melted snows of the high Sierras, terminating in a saline lake.

Sometime between 1899 and 1903, the powers that be in Los Angeles, led by Harrison Gray Otis and his son-in-law sucessor, Harry Chandler, hit upon the idea of buying up worthless land on the outskirts of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, then acquiring control of the Owens River and building an aqueduct to bring the water 250 miles over mountains and desert to the San Fernando Valley. Under the ruse of developing a plan to place 200,000 additional acres of Owens Valley land under irrigation, J.B. Lippencott of the United States Reclamation Service (who was also secretly receiving a salary from the City of Los Angeles) succeeded in persuading the farmers and mutual water companies to pool their interests and surrender their water rights to Fred Eden, Lippencott's agent and a former mayor of Los Angeles. Eden then resigned from the Reclamation Service, taking a job with the Los Angeles Water Department as assistant to William Mulholland, Chief of the Department, and turning over all maps, field surveys and stream measurements developed by the Service to the city.

The California labor movement, with its strength concentrated in San Francisco, had largely ignored Los Angeles for years. It decided, in 1907, however, when the American Federation of Labor decided to challenge the open shop of "Otis Town." The culmination of this bitter struggle occurred on October 1, 1910 when a bomb destroyed a good part of the L.A. Times publishing plant.

The authorities indicted John and James McNamara, both associated with the Iron Workers Union, for the bombing; Clarence Darrow, who had successfully defended Big Bill Haywood, Moyer and Pettibone in Idaho, represented them.

At the same time the McNamara brothers were awaiting trial, Los Angeles was preparing for a city election. Job Harriman, running on the socialist ticket, was challenging the establishment's candidate.

Harriman's campaign, however, was tied to the asserted innocence of the McNamaras. But the defense was in trouble: the prosecution not only had evidence of the McNamaras' complicity, but had trapped Darrow in a clumsy attempt to bribe one of the jurors. On December 1, 1911, four days before the final election, the McNamaras entered a plea of guilty in return for prison terms. The L.A. Times accompanied its report of the guilty plea with a faked photograph of Samuel Gompers trampling an American flag. Harriman lost badly.

The open shop campaign continued from strength to strength, although not without meeting opposition from workers. By 1923, the Industrial Workers of the World had made considerable progress in organizing the longshoremen in San Pedro and led approximately 3,000 men to walk off the job. With the support of the L.A. Times, a special "Wobbly squad" was formed within the Los Angeles Police Department and arrested so many strikers that the city's jails were soon filled.

Some 1200 dock workers were corralled in a special stockade in Griffith Park. The L.A. Times wrote approvingly that "stockades and forced labor were a good remedy for IWW terrorism." Public meetings were outlawed in San Pedro, Sinclair Lewis was arrested at Liberty Hill in San Pedro for reading the United States Bill of Rights on the private property of a strike supporter (the arresting officer told him "we'll have none of 'that Constitution stuff'") and blanket arrests were made at union gatherings. The strike ended after members of the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion raided the IWW Hall and attacked the men, women and children meeting there. The strike was defeated.

Los Angeles developed another industry in the early 20th century when movie producers from the East Coast relocated there. These new employers were likewise afraid of unions and other social movements: during Upton Sinclair's campaign for Governor of California under the banner of his "End Poverty In California" (EPIC) movement, Louis B. Mayer turned MGM's Culver City studio into the unofficial headquarters of the organized campaign against EPIC. MGM produced fake newsreel interviews with whiskered actors with Russian accents voicing their enthusiasm for EPIC, along with footage focusing on central casting hobos huddled on the borders of California waiting to enter and live off the bounty of its taxpayers once Sinclair was elected. Sinclair lost.

Los Angeles also acquired another industry in the years just before World War II: the garment industry. At first devoted to regional merchandise, such as sportswear, the industry eventually grew to be the second largest center of garment production in the United States.

Unions began to make progress in organizing these workers as the New Deal arrived in the 1930s. They made even greater gains in the war years, as Los Angeles grew even further.

By 1950 Los Angeles was an industrial and financial giant created by war production and migration. Los Angeles assembled more cars than any city other than Detroit, made more tires than any city but Akron, made more furniture than Grand Rapids, and stitched more clothes than any city except New York. In addition, it was the national capital for the production of motion pictures, radio programs and, within a few years, television shows. Construction boomed as tract houses were built in ever expanding suburban communities financed by the largess of the Federal Housing Administration.

Los Angeles continued to spread out, particularly with the development of the San Fernando Valley and the building of the freeways launched in the 1940s. When the local street car system went out of business Los Angeles became a city built around the automobile, with all of the social, health and political problems that this dependence produces.

Those macroeconomic changes have brought major social changes with them. While unemployment dropped in Los Angeles in the 1990s, the newly created jobs tended to be low-wage jobs filled by recent immigrants and other exploitable populations; by one calculation, the number of poor familes increased from 36 percent to 43 percent of the population of Los Angeles County during this time. At the same the number of immigrants from Mexico, Central America and Latin America has made Los Angeles a "majority minority" city that will soon be majority Latino.

Many older boundaries have changed over time. Watts, which once was predominantly black, is now mainly Latino. Compton, which lies outside of the City of Los Angeles, but within the County of Los Angeles, and which has gained a certain notoriety through rap music from N.W.A and other groups, is also increasingly Latino. While the Latino community within the City of Los Angeles was once centered in East Los Angeles, it now extends throughout the city. The San Fernando Valley, which represented a bastion of white flight in the 1960s and provided the votes that allowed Sam Yorty to defeat the first election run by Tom Bradley, is now as ethnically diverse as the rest of the city on the other side of the Hollywood Hills.

Rather than feeling closer, however, the opposite seems to have occurred. By the end of the 20th century, some of the annexed areas began to feel cut off from the political process of the megalopolis, leading to a particularly strong secession movement in the San Fernando Valley and weaker ones in San Pedro and Hollywood. The referendums to split the city were rejected by voters in November 2002.

That changed in the 1920's, when racial restrictions in housing, originally aimed at Asians, Mexicans and Jews, were applied to blacks. Blacks were confined to Watts and other communities in South Central Los Angeles, which received far fewer services than other areas of the city.

These policies led to housing problems in the 1940's as growth in the defense industry brought increasing numbers of African-Americans to the city. Efforts to provided integrated housing were turned back under a barrage of red-baiting directed at the public housing authorities in the 1950s.

Watts also had chronically high unemployment, but no employment agencies; three separate bus lines, but no direct lines to major centers of employment. Its schools were substandard and the nearest hospital was two hours away by bus. Watts was a small core of poverty in a city where, by 1965, the black population had multiplied ten times since 1950.

The Watts riots of 1965 nonetheless surprised the powers-that-be. The riot began with a minor police incident and lasted four days. Thirty-four persons were killed and 1,034 injured at a cost of $40,000,000 in property damage and looting. So many businesses burned on 103rd Street, the people called it "Charcoal Alley."

While the City and County did take some steps to deal with the lack of social services for the black community after the Watts riots - most visibly by building a County hospital to serve the community - in most ways things only got worse over the twenty-five years after the riots. De-industrialization closed all of the automobile and tire factories and the only steel plants and shipbuilding sites in the area stripped Los Angeles of the high-paying industrial jobs that had opened up for Africa-american and Latino workers. At the same time the drug trade and gang warfare reached crisis levels. The LAPD, which had followed a militaristic model since Chief Parker's regime in the 1950's, had become even more alienated from and hated by the minority communities it was supposed to protect and serve.

This was brought home in 1992, after a suburban jury in Simi Valley, located in Ventura County, acquitted the police officers who beat Rodney King the year before. After four days of rioting, more than fifty deaths, and billions of dollars of property losses later, the National Guard and the police finally regained control. It remains to be seen if there has been adequate change or if the pattern is destined to repeat.

During the Second World War, hostility toward Mexican-Americans took a different form, as local newspapers portrayed Chicano youths, who sometimes called themselves "pachucos" as barely civilized gangsters. Anglo servicemen attacked young Chicanos dressed in the pachuco uniform of the day: long coats with wide shoulders and pleated, high-waisted, pegged pants, or zoot suits, in 1943. Twenty-two young Chicanos were convicted of a murder of another youth at a party held at a swimming hole southeast of Los Angeles known as the "sleepy lagoon" on a warm night in August 1942; they were eventually freed after an appeal that demonstrated both their innocence and the racism of the judge conducting the trial.

Los Angeles-Latino community was largely disenfranchised until the 1990s, when redistricting led to the election of Latino members of the City Council for the first time since the 1950s and the first Latino members of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors since its inception. With the tremendous growth of the Latino community, primarily from immigration from Mexico, but also from Central America and South America, it is now the largest ethnic bloc in Los Angeles. While Antonio Villaraigosa lost in his race for Mayor in 2001, Latino political leaders are likely to come to the fore in the next decade.

Later, Chinese workers who helped to build the aqueduct to the Owens River and worked in the fields of the San Joaquin Valley spent their winters in a segregated ethnic enclave in Los Angeles. In 1872, eleven years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a violent anti-Chinese demonstration swept through Los Angeles' Chinatown killing Chinese residents and plundering their dry good stores, laundries and restaurants.

The labor vacuum created by the Chinese Exclusion Act was filled by Japanese workers and, by 1910, the settlement now known as "Little Tokyo" had risen next to Chinatown. By the eve of World War I, many Japanese farm laborers had saved sufficient funds to purchase or lease vegetable and fruit farming lands in such outlying areas as Gardena, Beverly Hills and San Gabriel.

During the years between the two world wars, Los Angeles' Asian American community also included small clusters of Korean Americans and Filipinos, the latter filling the void which followed the exclusion of the Japanese in 1924.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government authorized the evacuation and incarceration in concentration camps of all Japanese living in California irrespective of citizenship. The Japanese in Southern California were to report to temporary barracks located at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, just south of Pasadena. Nearly 20,000 of the state's 93,000 Japanese Americans were confined in these quarters before being taken further inland to the internment camps.

Since World War II, immigration from Asia and the Pacific has increased dramatically. The influx of immigrants from the Philippines, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia has led to the development of identifiable enclaves such as Koreatown in the central city, a Cambodian community in Long Beach, Samoanss in Compton, Hawaiian Gardens and Wilmington, a Thai neighborhood in Hollywood, Vietnamese in Chinatown and in Garden Grove in Orange County, Chinese in Monterey Park and nearby parts of the San Gabriel Valley and Japanese in Gardena.

See also List of mayors of Los Angeles, California.

Los Angeles is still the most important site in the United States for movie and television production. It faces increasing competition, however, from other parts of the United States and from Toronto and Vancouver.

The greater Los Angeles metro area has several notable museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the J. Paul Getty Center, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the UCLA Hammer Museum and the Norton Simon Museum. Until the 1960s the region was something of a "cultural wasteland" compared to San Francisco and New York--if culture is defined as the "high arts" of ballet, opera, classical music and legitimate theater. However, as the city flourished financially in the middle of the 20th century, the culture followed. Boosters such as Dorothy Buffum Chandler and other philanthropists raised funds for the establishment of art museums, music centers and theaters. Today, the Southland cultural scene is as complex, sophisticated and varied as any in the world.

Los Angeles is known for its mural art, and its thousands of examples of wall art are believe to outnumber those in every other city in the world. The city also has a famous "public art" program which requires developers to contribute one percent of the cost of construction of new buildings to a public art fund. Much of this money has been spent in downtown Los Angeles.

According to the official records of the City of Los Angeles, L.A. has a total area of 472.08 square miles. The extreme north-south distance is 44 miles, the extreme east-west distance is 29 miles, and the length of the city boundary is 342 miles.

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 1,290.6 km² (498.3 mi²). 1,214.9 km² (469.1 mi²) of it is land and 75.7 km² (29.2 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 5.86% water.

The highest point in Los Angeles is Elsie Peak at 5,080 feet. The city is mostly at sea level elevation or a few feet above.

The major waterway of Los Angeles is the Los Angeles River and water rights and battles have been a major part of this desert-bound city's history.

''Picture of the Los Angeles urban sprawl

Greater Los Angeles (also referred to locally as Southern California or The Southland) is such a sprawling area that residents refer to broad general sub-regions. It is not always meaningful to refer to Los Angeles as a distinct city, but people outside of Southern California commonly refer to the entire region as "L.A.," even though there are five counties, over 100 distinct municipalities, hundreds of neighborhoods and districts, and more people than any individual state except for Texas, New York, and Florida.

Some areas are defined by natural features such as mountains or the ocean; others are marked by city boundaries, freeways, or other constructed landmarks. For example, downtown Los Angeles (or simply "Downtown L.A.") is the area of Los Angeles roughly enclosed by the freeways that ring the area: The Harbor Freeway to the west, the Hollywood Freeway to the north, the Santa Ana Freeway to the east , and the San Bernardino Freeway to the south. Or, consider the San Fernando Valley: Lying north-northwest of Downtown L.A., "The Valley" is a 15 mile-wide basin ringed by mountains including the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains to the south, the San Gabriel Mountains to the east, the Santa Susana Mountains to the north, and the Coastal Range to the west.

Some other areas of Los Angeles include the Westside; South L.A. (formerly South-Central L.A.); and San Pedro/the Harbor area. Adjoining areas that are outside of L.A. city include the South Bay, the San Gabriel Valley and the Foothills. Many more exist beyond and in the adjacent counties.

The most important industries of Los Angeles are entertainment and media production, aerospace and telecommunications, law, tourism, health and medicine, manufacturing and transportation. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are extremely important to trade on the Pacific Rim.

As of the census of 2000, there are 3,694,820 people, 1,275,412 households, and 798,407 families residing in the city. The population density is 3,041.3/km² (7,876.8/mi²). There are 1,337,706 housing units at an average density of 1,101.1/km² (2,851.8/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 46.93% White, 11.24% African American, 0.80% Native American, 9.99% Asian American, 0.16% Pacific Islander, 25.70% from other races, and 5.18% from two or more races. 46.53% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There are 1,275,412 households out of which 33.5% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.9% are married couples living together, 14.5% have a female householder with no husband present, and 37.4% are non-families. 28.5% of all households are made up of individuals and 7.4% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.83 and the average family size is 3.56.

In the city the population is spread out with 26.6% under the age of 18, 11.1% from 18 to 24, 34.1% from 25 to 44, 18.6% from 45 to 64, and 9.7% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 32 years. For every 100 females there are 99.4 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 97.5 males.

The median income for a household in the city is $36,687, and the median income for a family is $39,942. Males have a median income of $31,880 versus $30,197 for females. The per capita income for the city is $20,671. 22.1% of the population and 18.3% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total people living in poverty, 30.3% are under the age of 18 and 12.6% are 65 or older.

''Picture of the Hollywood sign

• Hollywood
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
• Griffith Park

• The La Brea Tar Pits
• U.S. Bank Tower, tallest building in L.A.

• California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA)
• Loyola Marymount University
• Occidental College
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• University of Southern California (USC)

''Picture of the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Los Angeles is the home of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers men's basketball teams, the Los Angeles Sparks women's basketball team, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team, and the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team. To the Southeast, suburban Orange County is home to the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim hockey team and the Anaheim Angels baseball team.

The city has also hosted the Olympic Games twice, for the 1932 and 1984 Summer Olympics.

Communities and Neighborhoods within the City of Los Angeles

These are unincorporated areas within the city proper. For more communities and cities local to the L.A. area, see Los Angeles County, California.

• Arleta
• Bel Air
• Beverlywood
• Boyle Heights
• Brentwood
• Canoga Park
• Chatsworth
• Echo Park
• Encino
• Granada Hills
• Hancock Park
• Hollywood
• Holmby Hills
• Koreatown
• Los Feliz
• Marina del Rey
• Mission Hills
• North Hills
• North Hollywood
• Northridge
• Olive View
• Pacific Palisades
• Playa del Rey
• Porter Ranch
• Reseda
• San Pedro
• Sepulveda
• Sherman Oaks
• Silverlake
• Studio City
• Sunland
• Sunset Junction
• Sun Valley
• Sylmar
• Tarzana
• Tujunga
• Van Nuys
• Venice
• Watts
• West Hills
• Westchester
• Westwood
• Wilmington
• Winnetka
• Woodland Hills

Movies and television shows set in Los Angeles

• Blade Runner
• The Brady Bunch
• Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
• Dragnet
• Heat
• L.A. Law
• Nothing So Strange

External Links

The Mississippi River empties out of the southern portion of the state into the Gulf of Mexico.

Related Links: Superdome; Football; Baseball; Basketball; Hockey

• State dog : Catahoula Leopard Dog
• State bird : Eastern Brown Pelican
• State flower: Magnolia
• State tree : Bald Cypress
• State mammal : Louisiana Black Bear
• State wild flower : Louisiana Iris
• State reptile : American Alligator
• State insect: Honeybee
• State crustacean : Crawfish
• State amphibian: Green Tree Frog
• State songs: You Are My Sunshine, Every Man a King, and Give Me Louisiana

• The ancestors of Creoles generally came to Louisiana directly from France or from the French colonies in the Caribbean and settled in New Orleans or in South Eastern Louisiana.

• The ancestors of the Cajuns are the Acadians, a French-descended people of what are now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, Canada. When the British won the French and Indian War, the British forced all of the citizens to take a pledge of allegiance. Most Acadians declined and emigrated from Canada, most of them fleeing to the South Western portion of Louisiana, centered in the region around Lafayette.

Disambiguation

USS Louisiana was named in honor of this state.