Nicolas Barreyre is an associate professor of American history at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre. His current manuscript is tentatively entitled “Of Gold and Freedmen: Midwestern Sectionalism and Reconstruction, 1865–77.” His research deals with political economy, space, and the American state.
Dorothy Sue Cobble is a professor of history and labor studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. She is working on a biography of labor feminist and consumer activist Esther Peterson and finishing a study of U.S. labor's traditions of egalitarian liberalism and internationalism. During 2010–11 she was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation.
Gaines M. Foster is the author of Moral Reconstruction: Christian Lobbyists and the Federal Legislation of Morality, 1865–1920 (2002). He is T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University and, for his sins, an interim dean as well.
William Kostlevy is an associate professor of history and political science at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas. He is the author of Holy Jumpers: Evangelicals and Radicals in Progressive Era America (2010) and editor of the Historical Dictionary of the Holiness Movement (2nd edition, 2009).
Jonathan Levy, assistant professor of history at Princeton University, received his PhD from the University of Chicago. Author of “Contemplating Delivery: Futures Trading and the Problem of Commodity Exchange in the United States, 1875–1905,” American Historical Review (April 2006), he is completing The Ways of Providence: Capitalism, Risk, and Freedom in America, 1840–1920.
Ellen Litwicki is a professor of history at SUNY Fredonia. A specialist in cultural history, she is the author of America's Public Holidays 1865–1920 (2000) and several essays on American holidays. She is working on a book manuscript on domestic gift giving in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Scott Reynolds Nelson, former associate editor of this journal, is Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. His first book, Iron Confederacies (1999) was a business, labor, and economic history of the Southern Railway. Nelson's second book, Steel Drivin' Man (2006), on the life and legend of railway hero John Henry, won numerous prizes including the Merle Curti Prize of the Organization of American Historians. His other books include a social history of the American Civil War, written with Carol Sheriff, and a young adult book about how historians do research. He is at work on Crash: An Uncommon History of America's Financial Disasters, to be published by Knopf in 2012.
Scott J. Peters is an associate professor of education at Cornell University. His research examines American higher education's public mission and work. His latest book is Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement (2010).
Michael J. Pfeifer is an associate professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York. His major publications include The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (2011), Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947 (2004), and “The Northern United States and the Genesis of Racial Lynching: The Lynching of African Americans in the Era of the Civil War,” Journal of American History (December 2010).
Donald W. Rogers is a part-time lecturer in history at Central Connecticut State University and Housatonic Community College and the author of Making Capitalism Safe: Work Safety and Health Regulation in America, 1880–1940 (2009).
Sarah Abrevaya Stein is a professor of history and Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies at UCLA. Co-winner of the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, her books include Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce (2008) and Making Jews Modern: the Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (2004). She is currently at work on “Misfits: Classifying Jews and the Persistence of Empire,” an examination of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Jewish encounters with evolving legal systems during the twentieth century.
Laura M. Westhoff is an associate professor of history and education at the University of Missouri—St. Louis. She is the author of A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform, 1890–1917 (2007) and is writing a collective biography of Myles Horton, Dorothy Day, and Fred Ross titled “Educating for Activism.”
Andrew Zimmerman is an associate professor of history at the George Washington University. He is the author of Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (2001) and Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, the German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (2010), on which his essay in this issue is based.
