Lynn M. Hudson is an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she is also an affiliated faculty member of the African American Studies department. She earned an M.A. in history from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and her Ph.D. in history at Indiana University. Her areas of specialization include U.S. history, African American history, women and gender history, the history of the U.S. West, public history, and history and memory studies. She is the author of The Making of ‘Mammy Pleasant’: A Black Entrepreneur in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Her forthcoming book, West of Jim Crow: The Fight Against California’s Color Line (University of Illinois Press, 2020) documents the ways California was an innovator of methods to control, contain, and restrict African Americans.