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Angela Yvonne Davis (born January 26, 1944, in Birmingham, Alabama) is an American political activist and university professor who was associated with the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Davis was also a notable activist during the Civil Rights Movement and a prominent member and political candidate of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). Since leaving the CPUSA, she continues to identify herself as a democratic socialist and is currently a member of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. She first achieved nationwide notoriety when a weapon registered in her name was linked to the murder of Judge Harold Haley during an effort to free a black convict. The convict was being tried for the attempted retaliatory murder of a white prison guard who killed three unarmed black inmates. Davis fled underground and was the subject of an intense manhunt. She was eventually captured, arrested, tried, and acquitted in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history. Davis is a graduate studies professor emeritus of history of consciousness at the University of California and presidential chair at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She retired in the spring of 2008 and now works for racial, gender equality, gay rights, and prison abolition. Davis is a public speaker, nationally and internationally, and the founder of the grassroots prison-industrial complex-abolition organization Critical Resistance.

Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist whose column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979. A new column also appears on Yahoo! News each Friday. He has received dozens of awards for his work in print, television and film. Educated as a mechanical engineer, Richard Reeves began his career in journalism at the age of 23, founding the *Phillipsburg Free Press* in Phillipsburg, N.J. He has been a correspondent for the *Newark Evening News* and the *New York Herald Tribune* and was the Chief Political Correspondent of *The New York Times*. He has also written for numerous other publications, becoming National Editor and Columnist for *Esquire* and *New York Magazine* along the way. Named a "literary lion" by the New York Public Library, Reeves has won a number of print journalism awards and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror. In 2007, W.W. Norton will publish his biography and re-creation of the experiments of Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel prizewinning physicist, who was born on the frontier of New Zealand in 1871 and went on to become the greatest experimental scientist of his time, discovering the unimagined subatomic world we now know and then splitting the atom he first envisioned. He is currently working in the United States and Europe on a history of the Berlin Airlift, scheduled for publication in 2008.

On November 22, 1963, when he was hardly past his first thousand days in office, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was killed by an assassin's bullets as his motorcade wound through Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was the youngest man elected President; he was the youngest to die. Of Irish descent, he was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917. Graduating from Harvard in 1940, he entered the Navy. In 1943, when his PT boat was rammed and sunk by a Japanese destroyer, Kennedy, despite grave injuries, led the survivors through perilous waters to safety. Back from the war, he became a Democratic Congressman from the Boston area, advancing in 1953 to the Senate. He married Jacqueline Bouvier on September 12, 1953. In 1955, while recuperating from a back operation, he wrote *Profiles in Courage*, which won the Pulitzer Prize in history. In 1956 Kennedy almost gained the Democratic nomination for Vice President, and four years later was a first-ballot nominee for President. Millions watched his television debates with the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon. Winning by a narrow margin in the popular vote, Kennedy became the first Roman Catholic President. Responding to ever more urgent demands, he took vigorous action in the cause of equal rights, calling for new civil rights legislation. His vision of America extended to the quality of the national culture and the central role of the arts in a vital society. He wished America to resume its old mission as the first nation dedicated to the revolution of human rights. With the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps, he brought American idealism to the aid of developing nations. But the hard reality of the Communist challenge remained. Kennedy contended that both sides had a vital interest in stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and slowing the arms race--a contention which led to the test ban treaty of 1963. The months after the Cuban crisis showed significant progress toward his goal of "a world of law and free choice, banishing the world of war and coercion." His administration thus saw the beginning of new hope for both the equal rights of Americans and the peace of the world.

Eisenhower commanded the Allied Forces landing in North Africa in November 1942; on D-Day, 1944, he was Supreme Commander of the troops invading France. After the war, he became President of Columbia University, then took leave to assume supreme command over the new NATO forces being assembled in 1951. Republican emissaries to his headquarters near Paris persuaded him to run for President in 1952. "I like Ike" was an irresistible slogan; Eisenhower won a sweeping victory. Negotiating from military strength, he tried to reduce the strains of the Cold War. In 1953, the signing of a truce brought an armed peace along the border of South Korea. Eisenhower was elected for his second term. In domestic policy the President pursued a middle course, continuing most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs, emphasizing a balanced budget. As desegregation of schools began, he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to assure compliance with the orders of a Federal court; he also ordered the complete desegregation of the Armed Forces. "There must be no second class citizens in this country," he wrote. Before he left office in January 1961, for his farm in Gettysburg, he urged the necessity of maintaining an adequate military strength, but cautioned that vast, long-continued military expenditures could breed potential dangers to our way of life. He concluded with a prayer for peace "in the goodness of time." Both themes remained timely and urgent when he died, after a long illness, on March 28, 1969.

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.

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.

Gora is Indiana's representative to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities board and is one of the 57 presidents and chancellors on The New York Times/Chronicle of Higher Education higher education cabinet. She chairs the Mid-American Conference Presidents' Council and co-chairs the Central Indiana Corporate Partnership, where she previously chaired the governance committee. She serves on the boards of First Merchants Bank, Ball Memorial Hospital, and the Indiana Chamber of Commerce, where she co-chairs the Business-Higher Education Forum. Gora was named one of 2007's most influential women in Indiana by the Indianapolis Business Journal and one of 15 Women of Wonder in the spring 2008 issue of Indiana Minority Business Magazine. In 2005, she received a Torchbearer Award from the Indiana Commission for Women for her commitment to higher education. The award is the highest honor given by the state of Indiana to Hoosier women who have overcome or removed barriers to equality or whose achievements have contributed to making the state a better place in which to live, work or raise a family. She also received a Sagamore of the Wabash, Indiana's highest civilian honor, in 2005. In 2008, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Yeungnam University in South Korea. Gora came to Ball State from the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she had been chancellor since 2001. Previously, she served for nine years as provost and vice president for academic affairs at Old Dominion University in Virginia. She earned her bachelor