About the author
H. W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Centennial Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of numerous works of history and international affairs, including The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (1993), Into the Labyrinth: The United States and the Middle East (1994), The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s (1995), TR: The Last Romantic (a biography of Theodore Roosevelt) (1997), What America Owes the World: The Struggle for the Soul of Foreign Policy (1998), The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin (2000), The Strange Death of American Liberalism (2001), The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (2002), Woodrow Wilson (2003), Andrew Jackson (2005), Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (2008), and American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 (2010). His writing has received popular and critical acclaim; several of his books have been bestsellers, and The First American and Traitor to His Class were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He lectures frequently across North America and in Europe. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Atlantic Monthly, and elsewhere. He is a regular guest on radio and television, and has participated in several historical documentary films T. H. Breen is the Director of the Nicholas D. Chabraja Center for Historical Studies and William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968. He has taught at Northwestern since 1970. Breen's major books include The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England (1974); Puritans and Adventurers: Change and Persistence in Early America (1980); Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of the Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (1985); and, with Stephen Innes of the University of Virginia, "Myne Owne Ground" Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore (1980). His Imagining the Past (1989) won the 1990 Historic Preservation Book Award. His most recent book is Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (2004). In addition to receiving several awards for outstanding teaching at Northwestern, Breen has been the recipient of research grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the National Humanities Center, and the Huntington Library. He has served as the Fowler Hamilton Fellow at Christ Church, Oxford University (1987-1988), the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions, Cambridge University (1990-1991), the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University (2000-2001), and was a recipient of the Humboldt Prize (Germany). He has recently published American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (2010). He is now working on a book to be entitled Journey to a Nation: George Washington's Campaign to Bring the New Federal Government to the People 1789-1791. R. Hal Williams is professor of history at Southern Methodist University. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968. His books include The Democratic Party and California Politics, 1880--1896 (1973); Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (1978); The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age (1990); and Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (2010). A specialist in American political history, he taught at Yale University from 1968 to 1975 and came to SMU in 1975 as chair of the Department of History. From 1980 to 1988, he served as dean of Dedman College, the school of humanities and sciences, at SMU, and from 2002 to 2006 as dean of Research and Graduate Studies. In 1980, he was a visiting professor at University College, Oxford University. Williams has received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has served on the Texas Committee for the Humanities. He is currently working on a biography of James G. Blaine, the late-nineteenth-century speaker of the House, secretary of state, and Republican presidential candidate. Ariela J. Gross is John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History, and Co-Director of the Center for Law, History and Culture, at the University of Southern California. She has been a visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and Kyoto University. She is the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (2000) and What Blood Won't Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (2008), winner of the Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association; the Lillian Smith Award for the best book on the South, and the American Political Science Association Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics. Gross has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is now working on several comparative projects about law, race, and slavery in the Americas, and law, contemporary politics, and the memory of slavery in the U.S. and Europe.
