William Deverell is the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, and professor of history, spatial sciences, and environmental studies at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and the coeditor of Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s, Land of Sunshine: An Environmental History of Metropolitan Los Angeles, A Companion to California History, and A Companion to Los Angeles.