JAMES C. BRADFORD teaches early American and naval history at Texas A&M University. He has been a visiting professor at the Air War College. His publications include a microfilm edition of The Papers of John Paul Jones; essays on Jones, French and American privateering, and Henry T. Mayo; and the three volumes, Command under Sail, Captains of the Old Steam Navy, and Admirals of the New Steel Navy, from which part of the essays in this volume are drawn.
THOMAS J. CUTLER currently serves as Director, Walbrook Maritime Academy, in Baltimore, a federally funded project designed to keep at-risk, inner-city youth in school and to provide them with a career-focused education. A career naval officer, he taught history at the U.S. Naval Academy and is the author of Brown Water, Black Berets: Coastal and Riverine Warfare in Vietnam and The Battle of Leyte Gulf: 25–26 October 1944.
FRANCIS DUNCAN is retired from the historians’ office of the Atomic Energy Commission and its successor agencies, where he worked from 1962 to 1986. He won the Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt naval history prize for his Rickover and the Nuclear Navy. He and his co-author, Richard G. Hewlett, won the David D. Lloyd prize in history for their Atomic Shield, 1947–1952, volume two of A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. Duncan and Hewlett also wrote Nuclear Navy, 1946–1962.
WILLIAM M. FOWLER, JR., is professor of history at Northeastern University and editor of the New England Quarterly. His extensive works about the early Navy include Rebels under Sail: The American Navy during the Revolution; William Ellery: A Rhode Island Politico and Lord of Admiralty; Jack Tars and Commodores: The American Navy, 1783–1815; and Under Two Flags: The American Navy in the Civil War.
LLOYD J. GRAYBAR is professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University. A diplomatic and military historian, his publications include “Admiral King’s Toughest Battle” in Naval War College Review, “American Pacific Strategy after Pearl Harbor: The Relief of Wake Island” in Prologue, and “The Atomic Bomb Tests: Atomic Diplomacy or Bureaucratic Infighting?” in The Journal of American History.
JOHN B. HATTENDORF is Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books on naval history, including On His Majesty’s Service: Observations in the British Home Fleet from the Diary, Reports and Letters of Joseph H. Wellings; The Writings of Stephen B. Luce; Sailors and Scholars: A Centennial History of the Naval War College; Maritime Strategy and the Balance of Power (co-editor); Mahan Is Not Enough; and British Naval Documents, 1204–1960 (co-editor).
HAROLD D. LANGLEY is the former curator of naval history, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and adjunct professor of history at the Catholic University of America. He is the author of Social Reform in the U.S. Navy, 1798–1862, and A History of Medicine in the Early U.S. Navy; the co-editor of Roosevelt and Churchill: Their Secret Wartime Correspondence; and editor of So Proudly We Hail: The History of the United States Flag. His numerous articles and book chapters include studies of Winfield Scott Schley, the War of 1812, and four Secretaries of the Navy.
JOHN B. LUNDSTROM is curator of American and Military History at the Milwaukee Public Museum. His books The First South Pacific Campaign: Pacific Fleet Strategy, December 1941–June 1942, The First Team: Pacific Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway, and The First Team and the Guadalcanal Campaign analyze American conduct of the early phases of the Pacific War. His most recent book, Fateful Rendezvous (written with Steve Ewing), is a biography of Edward H. (Butch) O’Hare, and he has begun work on a command study of Frank Jack Fletcher.
JOHN K. MAHON is retired from teaching history at the University of Florida. A former civilian historian for the Office of the Chief of Military History and Visiting Professor of Military History at the U.S. Army Military History Institute, Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, he is the author of twenty-five journal articles and four books, including The War of 1812 and History of the Second Seminole War, 1835–1842.
CLARK G. REYNOLDS is professor of history at the College of Charleston. He has taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, University of Maine, and U.S. Merchant Marine Academy. He is the author of several naval and maritime history studies, including The Fast Carriers: The Forging of an Air Navy; Command of the Sea: The History and Strategy of Maritime Empires; Famous American Admirals; The Fighting Lady; and Admiral John H. Towers: The Struggle for Naval Air Supremacy.
DAVID ALAN ROSENBERG teaches history at Temple University. During 1996–1998 he will hold the Maritime Strategy Chair at the National War College. The author of dozens of articles, book chapters, and monographs on post–World War II military and naval history and strategy, he was the first military historian awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship. A commander (special duty, intelligence) in the U.S. Naval Reserve, he serves as a consultant to the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Office of the Secretary of the Navy and chairs the Secretary of the Navy’s Advisory Subcommittee on Naval History. He is currently writing a biography of Arleigh A. Burke.
JOHN H. SCHROEDER is professor of history and Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He is the author of Mr. Polk’s War: American Opposition and Dissent, 1846–1848, and Shaping a Maritime Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of the American Navy, 1829–1861. He is currently working on a biography of Matthew C. Perry.
ROBERT SEAGER II taught at the U.S. Naval Academy, the University of Maine, the University of Baltimore, and the University of Kentucky before retiring. His publications include And Tyler Too, a biography of the tenth president, as well as the biography titled The Letters and Papers of Alfred Thayer Mahan, in three volumes. He has edited The Papers of Henry Clay, volumes 7 through 9, and is currently writing a biography of Henry Clay.
TAMARA MOSER MELIA SMITH was a historian at the Naval Historical Center and taught at the Naval War College. Her publications include volume two of The Naval War of 1812 (co-editor) and Damn the Torpedoes: A Short History of U.S. Naval Mine Countermeasures, 1777–1991. She is currently completing “Desert Slash: A History of U.S. Mine Warfare during Desert Storm.”
WARREN F. SPENCER is retired from teaching history at the University of Georgia. A specialist in nineteenth-century French diplomatic history, his publications include The Confederate Navy in Europe and The United States and France: Civil War Diplomacy (co-author). He has just completed Raphael Semmes: A Philosophical Mariner.
WILLIAM N. STILL, JR., is retired from East Carolina University, where he was a professor of history and director of the Program in Maritime History and Underwater Research. He has written extensively on naval aspects of the Civil War, including Iron Afloat: The Story of the Confederate Ironclads, Confederate Shipbuilding, American Sea Power in the Old World: The United States Navy in European and Near Eastern Waters, and Why the South Lost the Civil War (co-author).
DAVID F. TRASK, a freelance historian, taught at Boston University, Wesleyan University, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and State University of New York at Stony Brook before becoming director of the Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State, and later the chief historian of the U.S. Army Center for Military History. His ten volumes include six on World War I, amonmofg them The United States in the Supreme War Council; Captains and Cabinets: Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917–1918; World War I at Home; and Admiral William Shepherd Benson: First Chief of Naval Operations (co-author).
VERNON L. WILLIAMS is professor of history at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of Lieutenant Patton and the American Army on the Punitive Expedition, 1915–1916 and several chapters on naval history. He is curently completing a biography of Marine Corps Major General Littleton W. T. Waller.
JOHN F. WUKOVITS, is a teacher and writer from Trenton, Michigan. His more than one hundred publications include Devotion to Duty, a biography of Vice Admiral Clifton A. F. Sprague, and essays on the battle of Okinawa and on Admiral Raymond Spruance.