CONTRIBUTORS

Edward L. Ayers is president emeritus of the University of Richmond, where he is now Tucker-Boatwright Professor of the Humanities, and former dean of arts and sciences at the University of Virginia. A historian of the American South, Ayers has written and edited ten books. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1864 (2003) won the Bancroft Prize for distinguished writing in American history, and The Thin Light of Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation in the Heart of America (2017) won the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2018. Ayers has been awarded the National Humanities Medal. 

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of History and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His new biography of Frederick Douglass will be published in fall 2018. His book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) received eight awards including the Bancroft Prize, the Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. 

Leigh K. Fought is an associate professor of history at Le Moyne College. Her book Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (2017) examines Douglass’s complex relationships with his grandmother, mother, and two wives as well as the women he met and worked with as an abolitionist and activist for women’s rights in America and Europe. She is also the author of Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord, 1810–1879 (2003) and the editor of the first volume of Frederick Douglass’s Correspondence (2009). 

James O. Horton was the Benjamin Banneker Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at George Washington University and historian emeritus of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Horton’s book Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North (1979), co-authored with Lois Horton, his wife and scholarly collaborator, established his reputation as a leading scholar of African American social history. He edited, authored, and co-authored ten books, including The Landmarks of African American History (2005) and Slavery and the Making of America (2004), the companion book for the WNET/PBS series of the same name. Horton served as president of the Organization of American Historians from 2004 to 2005. 

Lois E. Horton is professor emerita of history at George Mason University. Her work focuses on African American communities, race, gender, and social change. With James O. Horton she has written and edited numerous books, including Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American Memory (2006), Slavery and the Making of America (2004), Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America (2001), and In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700–1860 (1997).  

Randall Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein Professor at Harvard Law School where he teaches courses on contracts, criminal law, and the regulation of race relations. He served as a law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court. In his research and writing Kennedy addresses complex and controversial issues surrounding race in America. His most recent books include For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law (2013), The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency (2011), and Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal (2008). 

Steven Mintz, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, is a leading authority on the history of families, children, and youth and served as founding director of the Institute for Transformational Learning at the University of Texas. He co-edited The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of America from Discovery through the Civil War (2000), featuring documents from the Gilder Lehrman Collection, and is the author of fourteen books, including The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (2015) and Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood (2006). 

Lucas Morel is a professor of politics and head of the politics department at Washington and Lee University. His teaching and research focus on American government, political theory, Abraham Lincoln, and black American politics. He is the editor of Lincoln and Liberty: Wisdom for the Ages (2015) and Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man (2004), and author of Lincoln’s Sacred Effort: Defining Religion’s Role in American Self- Government (2000). He is working on a book on Lincoln and the American Founding. 

James Oakes is Distinguished Professor of History at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He received the Lincoln Prize in 2013 for Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012) and in 2008 for The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (2007). His recent work includes The Scorpion’s Sting: Anti-slavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014). 

Quandra Prettyman, senior associate in the English and Africana studies departments at Barnard College, was one of the first black faculty members at the college. She taught the first courses in African American literature there in the 1970s and is the editor of Out of Our Lives: A Selection of Contemporary Black Fiction (1975). An accomplished poet, her work has been published in I Am the Darker Brother: An Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans (1970) and The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century (1973), both edited by Arnold Adoff. 

David S. Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, focuses on American literature before 1900. His books include Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography (1995), for which he received the Bancroft Prize; John Brown: Abolitionist (2005); and Mightier Than the Sword: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Battle for America (2011).  

Manisha Sinha is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (2016), winner of the 2017 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and The Counterrevolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina (2000). Her research interests lie in the transnational histories of slavery and abolition and the history and legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction. 

Noelle N. Trent is the director of interpretation, collections and education at the National Civil Rights Museum at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. She wrote her doctoral dissertation at Howard University on “Frederick Douglass and the Making of American Exceptionalism.” She has presented papers and lectures at the American Historical Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the European Solidarity Center in Poland. Trent is currently working on MLK50: Where Do We Go from Here? commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination.