Ralph Young is a professor of History at Temple University. He has won several major teaching awards and is the author of Dissent: The History of an American Idea, a narrative history of the United States from the perspective of dissenters and protest movements, and editor of Dissent in America: The Voices That Shaped a Nation, a collection of four hundred years of dissenting speeches, petitions, letters, songs, poems, and essays that called for change, reform, or even revolution. He is also the founder of weekly campus-wide teach-ins at Temple in which students and faculty examine the historical context of controversial contemporary issues.