Kevin R. McNamara is Professor of Literature at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. He is the author of Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities (1996) and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of Los Angeles (2010). McNamara has published more than twenty articles primarily on cities and urban culture in such journals as Arizona Quarterly, Canadian Review of American Studies, College Literature, Contemporary Literature, Criticism, Interactions, the Journal of Urban History, and Prospects. His work has also been published in the Encyclopedia of American Studies ('The Idea of the City'), A Concise Companion to American Studies ('Regionalism'), and collections… edited in the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey.Louis Ferleger is Professor of History and chair of the History Department at Boston University. He is co-editor, co-author or editor of six books, including Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century and Slavery, Secession, and Southern History. He is series editor of the Historians in Conversation series published by the University of South Carolina Press and has co-edited a special issue of The Annals devoted to globalization. He has been awarded many fellowships and grants, including two awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an Earhart Fellowship, and a Twentieth Century Fund research grant.