William Deverell is Associate Professor of History in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. His research and writing concentrates on the history of the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. He is the author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 and co-author (with Greg Hise) of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Report for the Los Angeles Region . With Tom Sitton, he has edited California Progressivism Revisited and Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s. He is the former chair of the California Council for the Humanities and was the 2002-2003 Fellow of the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation of Los Angeles. In the summer of 2004, he will become Professor of History at the University of Southern California and will direct a USC/Huntington Library collaborative research and teaching institute devoted to California and the West.