William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles. He is past chair of the California Council for the Humanities and was recently the Beinecke Senior Fellow in Western Americana at Yale.