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 (California, 1994); coauthor of The West in the History of the Nation (2000) and Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for Los Angeles (California, 2000); and coeditor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s (2001) and California Progressivism Revisited (1994), both from California.