Edward L. Ayers is president and professor of history at the University of Richmond. He is the author of The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1992), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and In the Presence of Mine Enemies: Civil War in the Heart of America (2003), which won the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize.
L. Diane Barnes is associate professor of history at Youngstown State University and associate editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers. She is the author of Artisan Workers in the Upper South: Petersburg, Virginia, 1820–1865 (2008) and numerous chapters and articles. She is also editor of Ohio History.
Steven Deyle is associate professor of history at the University of Houston. He is the author of Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life (2005) and numerous articles on slavery in the American South.
Marc Egnal is professor of history at York University and author of numerous books on American history. His latest titles include Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (2009) and Divergent Paths: How Culture and Institutions Have Shaped North American Growth (1996).
Andrew K. Frank is associate professor of history at Florida State University. He is the author of Creeks and Southerners: Biculturalism on the Early American Frontier (2005) and several articles on southeastern Indians. He is currently completing Those Who Camp at a Distance: The Seminoles and Indians of Florida for the University of North Carolina Press.
Craig Thompson Friend is professor of history and director of public history at North Carolina State University. He is author of Along the Maysville Road: The Early American Republic in the Trans-Appalachian West (2005) and Kentucke’s Frontiers (2010). He is editor of Southern Masculinities: Perspectives on Manhood in the South since Reconstruction and coeditor of Southern Manhood: Perspectives on Masculinity in the Old South, with Lorri Glover, and of Family Values in the Old South, with Anya Jabour.
Larry Hudson has a background in social history with a primary area of research on work and the African-American family under slavery. His teaching interests include the American South, the Civil War, slavery, and comparative slavery. He is currently examining alcohol usage among the enslaved in antebellum America. Publications include “To Have and to Hold”: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina (1997).
James L. Huston has taught at Oklahoma State University for thirty years and now holds the position of Regents Distinguished Professor. His most recent book is Stephen A. Douglas and the Dilemmas of Democratic Equality (2007). His current interest involves the intersection of national economic development, farm work, and the free-labor ideology.
Charles F. Irons is associate professor of history at Elon University in North Carolina. He has explored the rise of evangelical Protestantism and the relationship between enslaved and free evangelicals in numerous articles and a recent book, The Origins of Proslavery Christianity: White and Black Evangelicals in Colonial and Antebellum Virginia (2008).
Matthew Mason is associate professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006), which was an alternate selection for the History Book Club. Along with Nicholas Mason, he edited Edward Kimber’s The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Anderson (2009). He is coeditor, with John Craig Hammond, of the forthcoming volume Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Slavery in the New American Nation.
Michael O’Brien is professor of American intellectual history at Cambridge University. He is author of the two-volume Conjectures Of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–60 (2004), which won the Bancroft Prize, and numerous other works of American history.
Peter S. Onuf is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Trained as a colonial historian under Jack P. Greene at Johns Hopkins, Onuf has written numerous works on Thomas Jefferson and his age; in 2006 he and his brother, international-relations theorist Nicholas G. Onuf, published Nations, Markets and War: Modern History and the American Civil War.
Brian Schoen is author of The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War (2009), winner of the 2010 Bennett H. Wall award, and several book chapters and articles on Southern political economy and sectionalism. He is assistant professor of history at Ohio University, where he teaches the history of the early American republic, the American South, and the Civil War and Reconstruction.
William G. Thomas is the John and Catherine Angle Chair in the Humanities and professor of history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served as director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia from 1998 to 2005 and as project manager of The Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War. His current work, “The Iron Way: Civil War and the Making of Modern America,” examines the relationship between the railroad culture of the 1850s and 1860s and the coming, fighting, and aftermath of the American Civil War. The book’s research draws on and from an accompanying digital project, “Railroads and the Making of Modern America,” available online at http://railroads.unl.edu (accessed October 2010).
Frank Towers teaches U.S. history at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. He is the author of The Urban South and the Coming of the Civil War (2004) and articles and book chapters on cities, politics, and race in the antebellum South.