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Joan Leegant has won numerous prizes for her story collection, *AN HOUR IN PARADISE* (W.W. Norton), including the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for the best book of Jewish-American fiction, and the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for the best book by a New England author. *AN HOUR IN PARADISE* was also a Fall 2003 Selection for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. Joan attended Radcliffe College, Boston University Law School, and the Vermont College MFA Program. After practicing law for several years, she went to Jerusalem for what was to be a six month stay. She remained there for nearly three years, becoming absorbed by the varieties of Jewish experience that later made their way into her fiction. She is a recipient of an artist grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and several fellowships from the MacDowell Colony. She teaches writing at Harvard University.

Charles Ogletree is the Jesse Climenko Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founding and executive director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at the law school. He is the author of the critically acclaimed *All Deliberate Speed*, and has received numerous awards and honors, including being named one of the 100+ Most Influential Black Americans by Ebony Magazine. In the immediate aftermath of the Crowley-Gates incident, Ogletree acted not only as counsel to Professor Gates but continues to act as advisor on police behavior to both Harvard University and the City of Cambridge. He was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.

**Francis J. Bremer** is Professor Emeritus of History at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and Coordinator of New England Beginnings, a partnership of institutions and individuals organized to commemorate the cultures that shaped early New England. He is the author of over a dozen books on puritanism in the Atlantic world, including most recently _Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism_. _One Small Candle: the Plymouth Puritans and the Beginning of English New England_ will be published in August.

Adam Nicolson is the author of *Seamanship*, *Sea Room*, *God's Secretaries*, and, most recently, *Seize the Fire*, about Admiral Nelson and the battle of Trafalgar. He has won both the Somerset Maugham and William Heinemann awards. The son of Nigel Nicolson and the grandson of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, he lives with his family at Sissinghurst Castle.

Landon Jones was managing editor at *People magazine* for eight years and wrote and edited for *Life, Time, Money, and People* for thirty-seven years. He is currently vice president of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. His books include *Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom *and *The Essential Lewis and Clark*. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Dominique Browning is the editor in chief of *House & Garden*. She lives in New York with her two teenage sons.

**Scott Simon **is the host of NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He has reported stories from all fifty states and every continent, and has won every major award in broadcasting, including the Peabody, the Emmy, the Columbia-DuPont, the Ohio State Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the Sidney Hillman Award. He also hosts shows for PBS and appears on BBC TV. He is the author of the novels Pretty Birds and Windy City, the memoir Home and Away, and the history Jackie Robinson and the Integration of Baseball. Image courtesy of Will O'Leary.

John K. Thornton is an American historian specializing in the history of Africa and the African Diaspora. Born 1949 into a military family and educated at the University of Michigan (1971) and UCLA (1972 and PhD 1979) Thornton focused initially on the history of the Kingdom of Kongo. From the start of this work, Thornton became convinced that the status of Kongo as a Christian country had not been fully recognized through his work on missionary baptismal statistics which he sought to show reflected large scale baptism and used this material to write a treatise on Kongo demography. His work on baptismal records resulted in the publication of the article "Demography and History in the Kingdom of Kongo" (1977), and a contribution on another baptismal document in the First Edinburgh Conference on African Historical Demography. His studies of Africa in the slave trade led him, at the urging of English historian Jeremy Black to write a systematic study of African wars and military culture in the period of the slave trade, which appeared in 1998 as *Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 *(1998). After having taught at Millersville University since 1986, John Thornton joined the Boston University faculty in fall 2003.

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.

Primarily an Early American historian, I also have subsidiary interests in African-American history and the study of the Atlantic world. I am a newcomer to the department, having been appointed in 2000 (although I was once an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar at Hopkins). I came from the College of William and Mary, where I was a professor of history and editor of the William and Mary Quarterly. My publications include: Colonial Chesapeake Society (1988), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire (1991), Cultivation and Culture: Work and the Shaping of Afro-American Culture in the Americas (1993), and Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998). Fellowships include: Institute of Early American History and Culture, Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, John Carter Brown Library, American Antiquarian Society, the Huntington Library, American Council of Learned Societies, and Guggenheim Foundation. Prizes include: Association of Caribbean Historians Best Article Prize (1995-1997); American Historical Association, Albert J. Beveridge Award and Wesley-Logan Prize (1998); Organization of American Historians, Elliott Rudwick Prize (1999); South Carolina Historical Society Prize (1999); Columbia University, Bancroft Prize (1999); Library of Virginia Literary Nonfiction Award (1999); Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Yale University, Frederick Douglass Prize (1999); Southern Historical Association, Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley Prize (1999); and American Philosophical Society, Jacques Barzun Prize (1999). My major project is provisionally entitled, "Jamaican Small World: White and Black in the Eighteenth Century." My microhistorical study has four major goals: to explore the process of colonization and the transition from homeland to adopted land in personal and comprehensive terms; to capture the routines and rhythms of daily life in southwestern Jamaica and related corners of the Atlantic world; to probe an interracial world of plain folk; and to paint a vivid portrait of the individuality of ordinary people and the particularity of one local community. My main informant is Thomas Thistlewood, a man of no particular distinction except that he kept one of the most detailed records of plantation life in existence. I have also a number of subsidiary plans e.g. I am co-editing a book, "The Black Experience and the British Empire," for Oxford University Press (to be submitted 2001) and another "Arming Slaves: From the Classical Era to the American Civil War" for Yale University Press (also to be submitted 2001). I have also guest edited (with David Eltis) a special issue, "New Perspectives on The Transatlantic Slave Trade," set to appear in William and Mary Quarterly, LVIII (January 2001).