Forum Network

Ann Marie Plane is associate professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She recently published Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England and is at work on an article on dream narration and dream interpretation among English colonists and Native Americans in 17th century New England.

Peter Benes served as Treasurer in 1977 and Archives Officer in 1978. He received the Forbes Award of the AGS in 1979 for his role in founding the organization and in recognition of the contributions made to gravestone studies by his first book, *The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carving in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689-1805* (1977). He is currently Director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife at Boston University.

Paul Finkelman, the President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy at Albany Law School, is the ninth most cited legal historian according to "Brian Leiter's Law School Rankings." He received his B.A. in American Studies from Syracuse University (1971), his Ph.D. in U.S. history from Chicago (1976), and was a fellow in law and humanities at Harvard Law School (1982-83). Professor Finkelman is the editor of the *The Political Lincoln: An Encyclopedia* (2009) published by CQ Press and is an advisor to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission. He is the author or editor of more than twenty-five books and more than one hundred and fifty scholarly articles on Abraham Lincoln, Constitutional law; American legal history; civil rights, civil liberties, race relations, freedom of religion and separation of church and state; the law of American slavery; Thomas Jefferson, the war on drugs; the electoral college; freedom of speech and press; the second amendment, American race relations, and baseball and law. His books include: *Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson* (M.E. Sharpe, 2001) *Dred Scott v. Sandford: A Brief History* (Bedford, 1995); *Landmark Decisions of the United States Supreme Court* (CQ Press, 2003); *The Library of Congress Desk Reference to the Civil War *(Simon and Schuster, 2002), *American Legal History: Cases and Materials* (Oxford, 3rd ed. 2004) and *A March of Liberty: A Constitutional History of the United States* (Oxford, 2002).

Professor Winch received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College. Her areas of specialty are African-American history, in both the United States and the Caribbean; the Early American Republic, and maritime history.

Rowan University

Charles Fuller is an American playwright best known for A Soldier's Play for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1958, after attending Villanova University for only two years, Fuller joined the army as a petroleum laboratory technician. Though stationed in Japan and Korea for four years total, he does not discuss much of his overseas experience. However, the impact of his experience can clearly be seen in some of his best known plays about Army life. Following his service, Fuller returned to Philadelphia, where he worked as a housing inspector in the Ludlow Section. It was during this time that Fuller received insight into social breakdown and moral desperation of people living in poverty.

Marc Prou is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Co-Director of the Center for African Caribbean and Community Development at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He has published several articles and chapters on Caribbean social history and culture, Creole language, immigration and education. Prou's research on Haiti addresses educational reform, language, race and ethnicity. He is the author of Spoken Haitian Creole: Kreyol Pale Kreyol Konprann. He is currently the Executive Director of the Haitian Studies Association, a scholarly organization that addresses research on Haiti from a multi disciplinary perspective.

Anne Marie Cammisa is associate professor of government at Suffolk University. Since 1994 she has been a visiting scholar at the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College.