MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT is a professor, author, diplomat, and businesswoman who served as the sixty-fourth secretary of state of the United States. In 1997, she was named the first female secretary of state and became, at that time, the highest-ranking woman in the history of the U.S. government. From 1993 to 1997, Dr. Albright served as the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations and was a member of the president’s cabinet. She is a professor in the practice of diplomacy at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Dr. Albright is chair of Albright Stonebridge Group, a global strategy firm, and chair of Albright Capital Management LLC, an investment advisory firm focused on emerging markets. She also chairs the National Democratic Institute and is honorary chair of the World Refugee & Migration Council. In 2012, she was chosen by President Obama to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in recognition of her contributions to international peace and democracy. Dr. Albright is a seven-time New York Times bestselling author. Her most recent book, Hell and Other Destinations, was published in April 2020. Her other books include Madam Secretary: A Memoir (2003) and Fascism: A Warning (2018).
DANIELLE S. ALLEN is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University. She is a political philosopher and public policy expert who focuses on democracy innovation, public health and health equity, justice reform, education, and political economy. She also directs the Democratic Knowledge Project, a K-16 civic education provider. Her books include Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Eequality, Cuz: An American Tragedy, and Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education. She has chaired numerous commission processes and is a lead author on influential policy road maps, including Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion, Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience, Pandemic Resilience: Getting It Done, Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, and Educating for American Democracy: Excellence in History and Civics for All Learners K-12. She was for many years a contributing columnist for the Washington Post and writes for the Atlantic.
MICHAEL BESCHLOSS is an award-winning historian, scholar of leadership, and best-selling author of ten books, most recently the acclaimed New York Times and Wall Street Journal best-seller Presidents of War. Beschloss appears regularly on television as the NBC News presidential historian and as a contributor to the PBS NewsHour. He has also been a contributing columnist to the New York Times. He has won an Emmy for his television work and received six honorary degrees and numerous other awards. He has the largest Twitter following of any American historian, more than half a million. Born in Chicago, Beschloss is an alumnus of Phillips Academy (Andover) and Williams College, where he studied under James MacGregor Burns, author of what remains the classic book on leadership. At the Harvard Business School, Beschloss studied leadership in both the private and public sectors. He has served as a historian at the Smithsonian, a scholar at the University of Oxford, and a senior fellow of the Annenberg Foundation. Among his earlier books are two volumes on Lyndon Johnson’s secret tapes; The Conquerors, about Franklin Roosevelt, Nazi Germany, and the Holocaust; and Presidential Courage. He is also coauthor (with Caroline Kennedy) of the number-one global bestseller Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.
DAVID W. BLIGHT is Sterling Professor of History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other publications. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction era at Yale is online at oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119. Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Blight maintains a website including information about public lectures, books, articles, and interviews at www.davidwblight.com.
MARK BRADFORD is a contemporary artist known for his large-scale abstract paintings created out of paper. Characterized by its layered formal, material, and conceptual complexity, his work explores social and political structures that objectify marginalized communities and the bodies of vulnerable populations. After accumulating layers of various types of paper onto canvas, Bradford excavates their surfaces using power tools to explore economic and social structures that define contemporary subjects. His practice includes painting, sculpture, video, photography, printmaking, and other media. In addition to his studio practice, Bradford engages in social projects alongside exhibitions of his work that bring contemporary ideas outside the walls of exhibition spaces and into communities with limited exposure to art. Bradford received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in 1995 and his MFA from CalArts in 1997. He has since been widely exhibited internationally and received numerous awards. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; Hauser & Wirth, London; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; and Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai.
CATHERINE BREKUS is Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard Divinity School. Her research focuses on the relationship between religion and American culture, with particular emphasis on the history of women, gender, Christianity, and the evangelical movement. She is the author of many articles and books, including Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845, which explores the rise of female preaching during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and Sarah Osborn’s World: The Rise of Evangelicalism in Early America, which argues that the evangelical movement emerged in dialogue with the Enlightenment. A companion volume, Sarah Osborn’s Collected Writings, is a critical edition of some of Osborn’s eighteenth-century manuscripts. Brekus is also the editor of The Religious History of American Women: Reimagining the Past, a collection of essays that asks how women’s history changes our understanding of American religion, and the coeditor (with W. Clark Gilpin) of American Christianities: A History of Dominance and Diversity, an introduction to the multiple forms of Christian expression in the United States. Brekus has received several awards, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Henry Luce III Faculty Fellowship in Theology, and a Pew Faculty Fellowship in Religion and American History.
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and professor of history at Rice University, the CNN presidential historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards, museums, colleges, and historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley their official U.S. presidential historian. His book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize, while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has received a Grammy Award for Presidential Suite and seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume annotated The Nixon Tapes won the Arthur S. Link-Warren F. Kuehl Prize. His most recent book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race, was a New York Times best-seller. He is a member of the Century Association, Council of Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.
KEN BURNS has been making documentary films for more than forty years. Since the Academy Award–nominated Brooklyn Bridge in 1981, Ken has gone on to direct and produce some of the most acclaimed historical documentaries ever made, including The Civil War, Baseball, Jazz, The War, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, Jackie Robinson, The Vietnam War, and Country Music. Future film projects include Muhammad Ali, Benjamin Franklin, The Holocaust and the United States, The American Buffalo, Leonardo da Vinci, The American Revolution, Emancipation to Exodus, and LBJ & the Great Society, among others. Ken’s films have been honored with dozens of major awards, including sixteen Emmy Awards, two Grammy Awards, and two Oscar nominations; and in September 2008, at the News & Documentary Emmy Awards, Ken was honored by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences with a Lifetime Achievement Award.
FRANCIS S. COLLINS, MD, PhD, was appointed the sixteenth director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate. In 2017, President Donald Trump asked Dr. Collins to continue to serve as the NIH director. President Joe Biden did the same in 2021. Dr. Collins is the only presidentially appointed NIH director to serve more than one administration. In this role, Dr. Collins oversees the work of the largest supporter of biomedical research in the world, spanning the spectrum from basic to clinical research. Dr. Collins is a physician-geneticist noted for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and his leadership of the international Human Genome Project, which culminated in April 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book. He served as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH from 1993 to 2008. Dr. Collins is an elected member of both the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in November 2007, and received the National Medal of Science in 2009. In 2020, he was named the fiftieth winner of the Templeton Prize, which celebrates scientific and spiritual curiosity.
PHILIP J. DELORIA is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017) with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two coedited books and numerous articles and chapters. Deloria received a PhD in American studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria is a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian. He is former president of the American Studies Association, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions, and will serve as president of the Organization of American Historians in 2022.
LILLIAN FADERMAN is the author of several award-winning books of lesbian, gay, and LGBTQ history, including Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, and Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death. Her memoir, Naked in the Promised Land, was reissued by Bloomsbury Press in 2020.
DREW GILPIN FAUST is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. Faust was the founding dean of Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2001–2007). Before coming to Radcliffe, she was the Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a member of the faculty for twenty-five years. She is the author of six books, including most recently This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), which was awarded the 2009 Bancroft Prize, the New-York Historical Society’s 2009 American History Book Prize, and was recognized by the New York Times as one of the “Ten Best Books of 2008.” Faust is a contributing writer at the Atlantic. Her honors include awards for distinguished teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2018, she was awarded the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity by the Library of Congress. She received her bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr in 1968, magna cum laude with honors in history, and master’s (1971) and doctoral (1975) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania.
HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy and Peabody Award–winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or coauthored more than twenty books and created more than twenty documentary films, including The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross; Black in Latin America; Black America Since MLK: And Still I Rise; Africa’s Great Civilizations; Reconstruction: America After the Civil War; The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song; and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series on PBS. Gates was a member of the first class awarded “Genius Grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998 he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. A native of Piedmont, West Virginia, Gates earned his BA in history from Yale University in 1973 and his MA and PhD in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. A former chair of the Pulitzer Prize board, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, and the Brookings Institution.
DONALD E. GRAHAM has been the chairman of the board of the Graham Holdings Company (previously the Washington Post Company) since 1993. He was chief executive officer of the company from May 1991 until November 2015. He was publisher of the Washington Post newspaper from January 1979 until September 2000. Graham was born on April 22, 1945, in Baltimore, Maryland, a son of Philip L. and Katharine Meyer Graham. After graduating from college in 1966, Graham was drafted and served as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He was a patrolman with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department from January 1969 to June 1970. Graham joined the Washington Post newspaper in 1971 as a reporter. He is a cofounder of TheDream.US, the largest national scholarship fund for Dreamers. Previously, he served as chairman of the District of Columbia College Access Program. He remains a member of the DC-CAP board. DC-CAP has assisted more than 23,000 D.C. students enroll in college and has provided scholarships totaling more than $33 million. Graham is a trustee of the Federal City Council and Gates Policy Initiative.
WALTER ISAACSON, a professor of history at Tulane University, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. He is the author of Leonardo da Vinci; The Innovators; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; and Kissinger: A Biography, and the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made.
JACK JACOBS received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rutgers University and served in the U.S. Army for twenty years, retiring as a colonel. For his actions in Vietnam, he was awarded three Bronze Stars, two Silver Stars, and the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest combat decoration. After retiring from the army, he founded a securitization firm, subsequently sold to Key Bank, and he was a managing director of Bankers Trust, where he ran foreign exchange options, and, subsequently, of Lehman Brothers, where he established an institutional hedge fund business. He is an on-air analyst for NBC News and MSNBC and serves on a number of corporate and charity boards. His memoir, If Not Now, When?, won a Colby Award, and he was an executive producer of the series Ten Weeks, which will appear on Hulu.
BILLIE JEAN KING was named one of the “100 Most Important Americans of the 20th Century” by Life magazine and is a 2009 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She is the founder of the Billie Jean King Leadership Initiative, founder of the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation, and part of the ownership group of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Los Angeles Sparks, and Angel City FC. In September 2020, King became the first woman to have an annual global team sports event named in her honor when Fed Cup, the women’s world cup of tennis, was rebranded as the Billie Jean King Cup. The National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open, was renamed the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in 2006 in honor of her accomplishments on and off the court. King serves on the board of the Women’s Sports Foundation, is an Adidas Global Ambassador, and is a past member of the board of the Elton John AIDS Foundation and a past member of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition. Her memoir, All In: An Autobiography, was published by Knopf in August 2021.
JILL LEPORE is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at the New Yorker, and the host of the podcast The Last Archive. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the history and technology of evidence. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books, including the international best-seller These Truths: A History of the United States (2018). Her latest book, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, is long-listed for the National Book Award.
WYNTON MARSALIS, world-renowned trumpeter, bandleader, and composer, is a leading advocate of American culture. Wynton assembled his own band in 1981 and began touring, performing more than 120 concerts annually for fifteen consecutive years. With the power of his musicianship, the infectious sound of his swinging bands, and a far-reaching series of performances and music workshops, Marsalis rekindled interest in jazz worldwide, inspiring a renaissance that attracted a new generation of fine young talent to jazz. Marsalis has recorded more than one hundred jazz and classical recordings, garnering nine Grammy Awards and selling more than seven million copies worldwide. In 1997, Marsalis became the first jazz artist to be awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in Music for his oratorio Blood on the Fields. Marsalis is a 2021 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters; he was honored with the National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama and holds honorary degrees from more than thirty colleges and universities across the nation. As an educator, Wynton reaches students through innumerable avenues, from his children’s books to his Jazz for Young People concerts and his Harvard lecture series. Marsalis presently serves as managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and director of jazz studies at Juilliard.
DAVID MCCULLOUGH has been acclaimed as a “master of the art of narrative history.” He has written twelve books that have been published in nineteen languages. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, twice winner of the National Book Award, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award. As may be said of few writers, none of his books has ever been out of print. In the words of the citation accompanying his honorary degree from Yale, “As an historian, he paints with words, giving us pictures of the American people that live, breathe, and above all, confront the fundamental issues of courage, achievement, and moral character.” Born in Pittsburgh in 1933, he was educated there and at Yale. He has enjoyed a lifelong interest in art and architecture and is as well a devoted painter. He and his wife, Rosalee Barnes McCullough, have five children and nineteen grandchildren.
JON MEACHAM is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer. The author of the New York Times best-sellers Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House, Franklin and Winston, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush, and The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, he is a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University, a contributing writer for the New York Times Book Review, and a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Meacham lives in Nashville and in Sewanee with his wife and children.
RITA MORENO has won all four of the most prestigious awards in show business: an Oscar, a Tony, two Emmys, and a Grammy. Moreno has starred on Broadway and London’s West End, appeared in more than forty feature films, and has performed in numerous regional theaters, including her one-woman show, Life Without Makeup, at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Moreno recently costarred in the Latinx reimagining of Norman Lear’s classic sitcom One Day at a Time. Her critically acclaimed documentary, Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and had its worldwide theatrical release in summer 2021. Moreno also costars in and is an executive producer of the Steven Spielberg remake of West Side Story, scheduled for December 2021 release. A recipient of the Peabody Career Achievement Award and the Kennedy Center Honor for her lifetime contributions to American culture, she was also honored by her peers as the fiftieth recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. Moreno’s all-Spanish-language album, Una Vez Más, was produced by her good friend Emilio Estefan, and she is a New York Times bestselling author with her first book, Rita Moreno: A Memoir. Moreno has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush and the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.
CAL RIPKEN JR. is baseball’s all-time Iron Man. He retired from baseball in October 2021, after twenty-one seasons with his hometown Baltimore Orioles. During his career he was Rookie of the Year, a nineteen-time All-Star, a two-time AL MVP, and is one of only ten players in history to amass over 400 home runs and 3,000 hits. In 2007 he was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In 1995, Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s Major League record for consecutive games played (2,130) and voluntarily ended his streak on September 20, 1998, after playing 2,632 consecutive games. Today Ripken is a successful business leader and philanthropist. He owns and operates Ripken Baseball, which runs youth baseball and softball complexes that host thousands of young ballplayers each year. He also owns the Aberdeen IronBirds, a Baltimore Orioles minor league affiliate that plays in his hometown in Maryland. In 2001, Cal and his family established the Cal Ripken Sr. Foundation in memory of the family’s patriarch. Since its inception, the foundation has impacted over 10 million kids in underserved communities, providing them with safe places to play and learn. Since 2007 Cal has served as a Special Public Diplomacy Envoy to the U.S. State Department and has traveled internationally on goodwill trips using baseball to bring people together.
SONIA SOTOMAYOR was born in the Bronx, New York, on June 25, 1954. She earned a BA in 1976 from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude and receiving the university’s highest academic honor. In 1979, she earned a JD from Yale Law School, where she served as an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She served as assistant district attorney in the New York County District Attorney’s Office from 1979 to 1984. She then litigated international commercial matters in New York City at Pavia & Harcourt, where she served as an associate and then partner from 1984 to 1992. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated her to the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, and she served in that role from 1992 to 1998. She served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1998 to 2009. President Barack Obama nominated her as an associate justice of the Supreme Court on May 26, 2009, and she assumed this role August 8, 2009.
BHU SRINIVASAN is a writer focused on the history of business and capitalism. Starting from the days of the Internet’s commercialization in the 1990s, his career has spanned across ventures in digital media, pop culture, technology, and financial data. Srinivasan arrived in the United States with his family at the age of eight, and as a child lived in the South, the Rust Belt, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. He lives in Marin County, California, with his wife and four children.
ELAINE WEISS is a journalist and author whose feature writing has been recognized with prizes from the Society of Professional Journalists, and her byline has appeared in many national publications. Her first book, Fruits of Victory, explored an organization of women activists during WWI. Her next, The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote (Viking/Penguin), won critical acclaim from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and the New Yorker, and was hailed as a “riveting, nail-biting political thriller” with powerful parallels to today’s political environment. The Woman’s Hour was a Goodreads Choice Award winner, was short-listed for the 2019 Chautauqua Prize, and received the American Bar Association’s highest honor, the Silver Gavel Award, also in 2019. Weiss is a popular speaker and media commentator on the themes of women’s history and political organization as well as voting rights. She lives in Baltimore.
JIA LYNN YANG is national editor at the New York Times. Before joining the Times in 2017, she was deputy national security editor at the Washington Post, where she was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of Trump and Russia. Before becoming an editor, Yang wrote about business and economics at the Post and at Fortune magazine for over a decade. Yang’s family immigrated to the United States from Taiwan in the 1970s and was able to stay in the country thanks to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. One Mighty and Irresistible Tide is her effort to understand the people who fought to give her family a place in America.