William Deverell is Professor of History at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 (1994) and Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past (2004). He co-authored Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region (2000) and The West in the History of the Nation (2000) and co-edited California Progressivism Revisited (1994) and Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001).