William Deverell
2020 Moderator
William Deverell is professor of history at the University of Southern California and director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, which he founded in 2004. He is the author of numerous studies of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American West, including Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past, Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910 and To Bind Up the Nation’s Wounds: The American West in the Aftermath of the Civil War. His forthcoming book, Kathy Fiscus, A Tragedy that Transfixed the Nation, tells the story of the first live, breaking-news TV spectacle in American history when in 1949, a three-year old girl fell down an abandoned well shaft in the backyard of her family’s home in Southern California.
