Robert W. Cherny is a professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University. His research and teaching interests are in U.S. history 1865–1940, politics, labor, and the West, especially California and San Francisco. His published work includes American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900 (1997); San Francisco, 1865–1932 (1981), with William Issel; A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (1985); coedited anthologies on California women and politics (2011) and labor and the Cold War (2004); coauthored textbooks on U.S. and California history; and numerous journal articles, the most recent of which deal with communism and anticommunism on the West Coast. He has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Distinguished Fulbright Lecturer at Moscow State University, and Senior Fulbright Lecturer at Heidelberg University, and he has spoken to Teaching American History programs around the country. He is currently finishing a biography of Victor Arnautoff, a leading muralist in San Francisco and an officer in the White Siberian Army during the Russian Civil War who became a member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s and emigrated to the Soviet Union at the end of his life. (Biography from the Organization of American Historians website: http://www.oah.org/lectures/lecturers/view/1519