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During his few weeks as Vice President, Harry S Truman scarcely saw President Roosevelt, and received no briefing on the development of the atomic bomb or the unfolding difficulties with Soviet Russia. Suddenly these and a host of other wartime problems became Truman's to solve when, on April 12, 1945, he became President. Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri, in 1884. He grew up in Independence, and for 12 years prospered as a Missouri farmer. He went to France during World War I as a captain in the Field Artillery. Returning, he married Elizabeth Virginia Wallace, and opened a haberdashery in Kansas City. Active in the Democratic Party, Truman was elected a judge of the Jackson County Court (an administrative position) in 1922. He became a Senator in 1934. During World War II he headed the Senate war investigating committee, checking into waste and corruption and saving perhaps as much as 15 billion dollars. As President, Truman made some of the most crucial decisions in history. Soon after V-E Day, the war against Japan had reached its final stage. An urgent plea to Japan to surrender was rejected. Truman, after consultations with his advisers, ordered atomic bombs dropped on cities devoted to war work. Two were Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japanese surrender quickly followed. In June 1945 Truman witnessed the signing of the charter of the United Nations, hopefully established to preserve peace. After on re-election, Truman decided not to run again, he retiring to Independence. At age 88, he died December 26, 1972, after a stubborn fight for life.

Henry Louis Gates Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of *the Oxford African American Studies Center*, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies, and of *The Root*, an online news magazine dedicated to coverage of African American news, culture, and genealogy. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of *The Future of the Race* (1996), and the author of a memoir, *Colored People* (1994), that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his other books are *The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers* (2003); *Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man *(1997); and *Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars* (1992). He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled *Black Letters and the Enlightenment*. Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in History from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. In his career he has received nearly 50 honorary degrees, from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Williams College, Emory University, Howard University, University of Toronto, and the University of Benin.

Since completing the Natural Resources graduate program at UNH in 1994, Mary Martin has continued working at the Complex Systems Research Center as a research assistant professor. Martin's work has focused primarily on the use of hyperspectral remote sensing data for the determination of forest productivity, nutrient cycling and species classification. This work has utilized data from NASA's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) which has been flown extensively over a number of sites in the northeastern US. This work is a multi-investigator effort involving UNH faculty/staff and researchers from the US Forest Service Norteastern Station in Durham. Extensive field data collections, GIS data, remote sensing imagery, and ecosystem modeling are combined in this effort to scale relationships derived from intensive plot level sampling to the full extent of our image data.

Dr. Smith is a USDA Forest Service research scientist working cooperatively with the CSRC Forest Ecosystems Group on the MAPBGC project and various field research projects. She is the lead investigator on the NACP Landscape level field measurement campaign

With an undergraduate training in traditional geology, Scott Bailey's graduate work turned to hydrology and biogeochemistry. He is broadly interested in the influence of substrate, including soils, geologic parent-materials, landforms, and water, on the structure and function of ecosystems. Specific areas of current focus include evaluation of watershed mass balance studies and retrospective soil monitoring to determine temporal dynamics of forest soil base cation supply, the role of secondary minerals as nutrient reservoirs in forest soils, site factors responsible for nutritional stress in sugar maple, and the role of seepage and fractured-rock groundwater discharge in nutrient cycling and biodiversity. Current projects range in location from the Allegheny Plateau in Pennsylvania to the Chic-Choc Mountains in Quebec, with a special emphasis on the Hubbard Brook, Cone Pond, and Sleepers River Research Watersheds.

Helen E. Lee earned a BA at 1981 Harvard University in 1981 and a JD at Harvard Law School in 1985. She focuses in Writing and humanistic studies. Helen joined the MIT faculty in 1997. Lee is a highly regarded author whose general subject, the lives and families of African-Americans, has come vividly to life in two well-received novels, *The Serpent's Gift (1994)* and *Water Marked (1999)*. An inspired teacher and mentor at MIT, Lee has also served as fiction editor of "Callaloo," a major literary journal, and as a volunteer writing teacher in Boston-area correctional facilities.

B.S., Forest Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1984. M.S., Forestry, University of New Hampshire, 1991. Ph.D., Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire, 1996. Research Interests: 1. Develop the capability to map forest canopy level cation concentrations using emerging remote sensing technology. 2. Use maps developed in (1) to parameterize ecosystem models, assist with national forest land management planning, and assess ecosystem health at the landscape scale. 3. Understand how the biogeochemical status of a given site may affect sugar maple health. Current Research: 1. Extensive Databases and High Resolution Remote Sensing as Drivers for Models of Ecosystem Function: A Case Study of the White Mountain National Forest, New Hampshire. 2. Assessing the effects of historical land use on forest productivity and response to climate change and CO2: A remote sensing, field, and modeling analysis of the White Mountain National Forest. 3. Foliar chemistry as an indicator of forest ecosystem status, primary production and stream water chemistry. 4. Regional Sugar Maple Study.

Richard Smith is an independent historian. For more than a decade he has been “becoming” Thoreau: dressing up in meticulous 19th-century regalia, reading his essays in front of crowds, fielding questions (in the first person) from the public, about the man’s personal life and politics.

Randall Kenan, writer, biographer of James Baldwin, and author of *The Fire This Time* (2007), looks at the life of Baldwin in the context of today -- where we are with civil rights, religion and impoverished African Americans.

A first generation descendant of Portuguese immigrants from the Alto Alentejo region of Portugal, Ana Patuleia Ortins grew up with the ethnic lore and traditions attached to the food of her ancestors. She holds a degree in culinary arts and teaches Portuguese cooking in her own kitchen and at local colleges.