MAX D. BAUMGARTEN, RYAN FUKUMORI, DANIEL LYNCH, AND CELESTE MENCHACA Deep Los Angeles A Roundtable on Histories of Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century D URING THE first weekend of October 2015, the University of California at Los Angeles and the Huntington Library co-hosted a graduate student conference on the history of Los Angeles and Southern California. “Deep L.A.,” as it was titled, was a project over two years in the making, a collaborative effort between graduate scholars at the Univer- sity of Southern California and UCLA. Ideas for a graduate symposium began out of discus- sions from “Studies in Urban History: Los Angeles,” a joint USC/UCLA graduate history course co-taught by Drs. William Deverell and Eric Avila. Several of the students enrolled in the class were also part of a multi-campus L.A. history writing group that convened monthly at the Huntington Library, where we, the four authors of this article, formalized plans for the conference in the summer of 2013. The theme of the conference counterbalanced the spatial, temporal, and topical vast- ness of Los Angeles history with attention to the intimate textures and microsocial foci that this historiography demands. That is, centering on the city and region offered a foundation to explore what constitutes a deep historical practice on Los Angeles and Southern California through a heterogeneity of figures, institutions, neighborhoods, landscapes, and movements. “Deep L.A.” convened eighteen graduate historians to share their work, with scholars from institutions both local (USC, the Claremont Graduate University, and UCs Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside, Irvine, and Santa Barbara) and far flung (the University of Virginia). Since then, we have collaborated with the editorial board of California History to assemble four of the scholars from the Deep L.A. conference whose research offers novel frameworks for the study, application, and instruction of Los Angeles history. In addition, in this article the four of us offer our own thoughts on the intriguing works of scholarship included in this issue, alongside more general forecasts on the research, writing, and presentation of Southern California’s storied past. It is our privilege to continue these intermural collaborations and conversations through this special issue of California History. 92 FALL 2016 California History, Vol. 93, Number 3, pp. 92–100, ISSN 0162-2897, electronic ISSN 2327-1485. © 2016 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/CH.2016.93.3.92.