William F. 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 Whitewashed Adobe: Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, and coeditor of The Blackwell Companion to Los Angeles and of The Blackwell Companion to California History. He has been a fellow at the Beinecke Library at Yale, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute.