William Francis Deverell
· ProfessorUniversity of Southern California · Environmental Studies
Active 1968–2024
About
William Francis Deverell is a professor of history, spatial sciences, and environmental studies at the University of Southern California. He is an American historian specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth-century American West, with a focus on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. Deverell is the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, a collaborative research and teaching entity between USC and the Huntington Library. His research explores the aftermath of the Civil War in the American West, and he has published numerous books and papers on the history of California and the American West, including works on racial and ethnic conflict, urban environmental history, and the development of Los Angeles. Deverell has also contributed to high school outreach initiatives and directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. His academic background includes a Ph.D. in history from Princeton University, and he has held appointments at USC, Caltech, UC San Diego, and other institutions.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Media studies
- Visual arts
- Art history
- Art
- History
- Geography
- Philosophy
- Law
Selected publications
Walter Nugent and the Broadening of U.S. History
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era · 2024-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Former SHGAPE president Walter Nugent passed away in 2021. On April 1, 2023, historians gathered at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, to remember him. William Deverell, Nancy Unger, Donna Gabaccia, Alan Lessoff, Charles Postel, and Annette Atkins spoke about Walter Nugent as a scholar, a colleague, a mentor, and a friend; then the audience joined in with their own memories and stories. The following roundtable is a lightly edited version of the panelists’ comments from that day, including an introduction that William Deverell wrote for the journal. We have included a Walter Nugent Reading List at the end—a selected bibliography of his books and articles, as well as works about him.
Review: <i>Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion</i>, by Elliot West
Pacific Historical Review · 2024-01-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondinginstitution of slavery (p.228) Yet, the reflex of slaving would continue in Texas for another century, as described in the book's epilogue.This book masterfully contributes to various historiographies that converge in Texas history.It discusses fluid identities of the Texas borderlands, fraught Spanish efforts to quell Native groups, the durability and longevity of Native power in the region, the agency of enslaved persons; and slavery's foundations for the Anglo-American settlement and political organization of Texas.Ultimately, Barba places violence and state-building in tension: the "slave wealth" that made colonization profitable had a "boomerang effect" that created the conditions that made colonization unstable (pp.29, 90).At times this work reads like two books in one.It offers both a sweeping geopolitical interpretation on how slaving sparked conflict between rival colonizing powers in the borderlands, and a cultural comparison of slaving practices between Hispanics, Natives, and Anglo-Americans.These two narratives would be easier to balance if they were separated into different chapters.
University of California Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Geography
University of California Press eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Philosophy
WHA Presidential Address 2023: Searching for a Redemptive West
Western Historical Quarterly · 2023-11-27
article1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This essay, a written version of the author’s October 27, 2023 Western History Association presidential address, asks about the West as space for redemption and exodus. Do Civil War histories and western histories offer hope of healing from the violence they engender? Or is every hopeful moment made destructive by violence, greed, and cultural blinders? Damaged Civil War soldiers went west and post-war Los Angeles became a place where many people imagined rebuilding their lives. White dreams proved exclusive: Angelenos burned out Chinese immigrants and shattered the western dreams of Black residents. Does writing new histories and ensuring that such violence is marked and remembered move toward hope? The essay considers both Civil War Era and contemporary redemption. Can remaking civic spaces around commemorations offer redemption? Los Angeles Chinese communities and their persistent efforts to hold space marking the1871 massacre as the city recreated downtown again and again could offer a model.
2023-09-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Arizona Press eBooks · 2022-08-23
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingCalifornia History · 2021-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingResearch Article| August 01 2021 A Conversation with William F. Deverell, Damon B. Akins, and William J. Bauer Jr., about We Are the Land: A History of Native California William F. Deverell, William F. Deverell William F. Deverell is director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West and professor of history at the University of Southern California. He recently published Kathy Fiscus: A Tragedy That Transfixed the Nation (Los Angeles: Angel City Press, 2021). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Damon B. Akins, Damon B. Akins Damon B. Akins is a former social studies teacher at John H. Francis Polytechnic High School in Los Angeles. He now teaches Native American history at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar William J. Bauer, Jr. William J. Bauer, Jr. William J. Bauer Jr. (Wailacki and Concow of the Round Valley Indian Tribes) is a professor of history and program director for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research is focused on oral history, labor, and California Indian history. He is coauthor, with Damon Akins, of We Are the Land: A Native History of California (2021), and author of California through Native Eyes: Reclaiming History (2016) and We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (2009). He has served on the councils of the Western History Association and the American Society for Ethnohistory, on the American Historical Association’s Committee on Minority Historians, and on the Organization of American Historians’ Committee on the Status of African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and Native American (ALANA) Historians and ALANA Histories. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2021) 98 (3): 108–118. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.3.108 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William F. Deverell, Damon B. Akins, William J. Bauer; A Conversation with William F. Deverell, Damon B. Akins, and William J. Bauer Jr., about We Are the Land: A History of Native California. California History 1 August 2021; 98 (3): 108–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2021.98.3.108 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California2021 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
Pacific Historical Review · 2020-01-01
article1st authorCorrespondingBook Review| July 03 2020 Review: The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fiskin; Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, by Gordon H. Chang; Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, by Gordon H. Chang et al. The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad. Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fiskin, eds. (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2019. xiii + 539 pp.)Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. By Gordon H. Chang. (Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 312 pp.)Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project. By Gordon H. Chang et al. (Digital history, http://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/) William Deverell William Deverell University Of Southern California Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (2020) 89 (3): 450–455. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.3.450 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation William Deverell; Review: The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fiskin; Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, by Gordon H. Chang; Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project, by Gordon H. Chang et al.. Pacific Historical Review 3 July 2020; 89 (3): 450–455. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2020.89.3.450 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2020 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.
Looking For Los Angeles in La La Land
Reviews in American History · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Art history
Looking For Los Angeles in La La Land William Deverell (bio) Gary Krist, The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles. New York: Broadway Books, 2018. 416 pp. Bibliography, notes, and index. $17.00. Ronny Regev, Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. xii + 273 pp. Notes and index. $27.95. Los Angeles is an invented city. That truism, coaxed or hammered into insight, has driven a lot of writing, talking, and hectoring about the City of Angels. It offers expansive ground upon which to offer analyses having to do with making something out of nearly nothing. The specifics of the invention litany are varied. Los Angeles is too big for its location. It ought not be where it is. It is unaccountably far from the coast, and thus should not be. It does not have enough local water supplies to meet the thirst of its many millions, its industries, its citrus, grains and fruits, its pipes and infrastructure, not to mention all those lawns. Yet, behold: Los Angeles comes to pass. Invention stretches from the place itself to what people do there, to the business end of all that inventing going on in Southern California. As an invented city, the logic seems to follow, Los Angeles invites—no, germinates—invention: of technology, media, artistry, creativity. Since Los Angeles is invented, it launches other inventive impulses in the air, as it were, to mingle with all that sunshine. The result is downright febrile. Up springs the motion picture industry and all that its revolutionary technology has spawned. Los Angeles invents modern fame and glamour. Media and artistry flower in path-breaking forms. There is then the concomitant re-invention of person, identity, the opportunity to take different paths toward fulfillment or self-realization. Start anew in Los Angeles, rejuvenate, regenerate, recreate and re-create. Come to Los Angeles and try to keep up with all that inventing and re-inventing going on. Start the clock over as to the job, or in spirit and faith, the body, relationships, self-expression—whatever. It is exhilarating and exhausting all at once. Novelist and non-fiction writer Gary Krist presents his take on all that making going on in Los Angeles in The Mirage Factory. Historian Ronny Regev [End Page 290] offers a complementary discussion in Working in Hollywood, her fine book on the inner mechanisms of the Hollywood studio system. The two make for a good pairing: one a sweeping account of a few Promethean figures at work in the clay that would become Los Angeles, the other a smart social history of the studio system, a mirage factory if there ever was one. Krist takes as his subject the creation of Los Angeles itself, or at least modern Los Angeles, but he puts a biographical spin on the concept from the get-go. Set in the topsy-turvy decades before World War II, Krist’s book is lively, a yarn spun well. He wraps his story around three compelling lives that intersect in time and place and forever—he insists—change both. Meet filmmaker D.W. Griffith, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and civil engineer William Mulholland. All three are known already, famed in their time and, though less so, ours. Putting them alongside one another in the pages, paragraphs and settings of this book reveals new facets about Los Angeles. None started out there, all made their way there, and, as this story goes, they made the place that made and then broke them. It sounds Biblical, and it is meant to be thus. Yet Krist also makes the conceptual point that even if all of the inventing going on may be a ruse, a mirage is the promise of salvation just beyond reach, brought to imagined life by desperation. As described by Krist, Griffith, Mulholland, and McPherson each achieve two different and lasting things on the far west coast. They drive modern Los Angeles into being and, in so doing, epitomize the place and its willful imagining into existence, shape, and meaning. It is an understandable reflex, this organizational scheme beholden to three lives boldly...
Frequent coauthors
- 35 shared
Tom Sitton
- 26 shared
Andrew Rolle
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens
- 25 shared
Simon Elliott
California State University, Northridge
- 25 shared
Suellen Cheng
Association of Research Libraries
- 25 shared
R. F. Acuna
California State University, Northridge
- 25 shared
Doug Flamming
National Museum of American History
- 25 shared
Gloria Ricci Lothrop
- 25 shared
D. Spooner
Motorola (United States)
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