This 'party historian' chronicled the world history of nightlife and L.A. gets its due

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Set us as preferred A memorable evening out on the town is about escape — from work, from obligations and daily drudgery, and (hopefully) from the woes of the world, if only for a few hours.Dressing up, drinking, dancing, flirting and frolicking amid immersive sounds and stimulating sights beckons most of us at some point — especially when we’re young — which makes it all significant on a personal and cultural level.

But social scenes have never been considered a heady topic worthy of deeply reflective documentation.Historian Imogen Willetts wants to change that.“I love the idea of doing this kind of big, grand sweep of nightlife, and treating eras like the club scene of the early 2000s and L.A.

celebrity culture with the same seriousness as 18th century pleasure gardens in London,” Willetts says via Zoom from her home in the U.K.She highlights these hedonistic eras in her recently published book “Up All Night: A World History of Nightlife.”Book ReviewUp All Night: A World History of Nightlife By Imogen Willetts Grove Press: 384 pages, $28If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.The initial pages center on 17th century Edo (now Tokyo), and its government-controlled red light district, Yoshiwara.

Willetts describes it as the first bona fide nightlife zone in history and likens Yoshiwara to an “Orwellian Coachella.” The district’s saki-soaked amusements went on to inspire Japanese fashion (from intricate kimono looks to stacked footwear), art (woodblock prints and paintings) and Kabuki theater for hundreds of years to come.In the book, Willetts covers other pivotal party locales throughout the ages while defining nightlife as “a commercial and secular environment designed to offer “a variety of pleasures at night...