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Professor Linda Heywood is the author of *Contested Power in Angola*, editor of and contributor to *Central Africans Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora*, and co-author with John Thornton of *Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of America *(Cambridge University Press, July, 2007). Her articles on Angola and the African Diaspora have appeared in *The Journal of African History*, *Journal of Modern African Studies*, *Slavery and Abolition*, and the *Journal of Southern African Studies*. She has served as a consultant for numerous museum exhibitions, including "African Voices" at the Smithsonian Institution, "Against Human Dignity" sponsored by the Maritime Museum, and the new exhibit at Jamestown, Virginia. She was also one of the history consultants and appeared in the PBS series *African American Lives* (2006) and *Finding Oprah's Roots* (2007).

Lois Brown joined the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in 1998. Currently, she is the Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, a center dedicated to creating invigorating public programs, supporting the leadership potential of students, and creating events that allow dynamic and productive consideration of vital contemporary issues and significant historical questions. A recipient in 2004 of one of the college's two Distinguished Teaching Awards awarded that year, she also was a Baccalaureate speaker in 2004 and delivered the faculty address at the 2002 Convocation. Brown's research and teaching focuses on nineteenth-century African American and American literature and culture, abolitionist narratives, and evangelical juvenilia. A 2000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award recipient, she has been affiliated with the Harvard University Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research where she also has been a visiting fellow. Brown has lectured widely and published articles on African American literature, women's writing, early American education, and African American history and religion. In 2001, the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston recognized her work with one of its first African American History Awards and lauded her for her "extraordinary commitment to American history" and her "obvious commitment to education and equality." Brown's biography, *Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution*, published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2008, has been hailed as the definitive Hopkins biography for decades to come. Photo courtesy of Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.

Dr. Ruth Herndon, Associate Professor (Ph.D., American University, 1992). Dr. Herndon's teaching and research focus on early American social history, with a special emphasis on marginalized people in the colonial and Revolutionary eras--children, women, the poor, servants, and slaves. Her major publications include a monograph on the transient poor in the eighteenth century, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), an essay in the Journal of Economic History (co-authored with John E. Murray), "Markets for Children: The Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship" (2002), and an anthology (co-edited with John E. Murray), Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009). For over ten years, Dr. Herndon has been collaborating with Dr. Ella Wilcox Sekatau, medicine woman, ethnohistorian and genealogist of the Narragansett Tribe, on a project to re-tell New England history using both Euro-American and Narragansett sources. They have published several jointly-authored essays, one of which won the Heizer prize from the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1998. Dr. Herndon's current project is Children of Misfortune: The Fates of Boston's Poor Apprentices, a study that traces the lives of children bound out from the Boston almshouse in the eighteenth century. More information can be found on Dr. Herndon's webpage: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~rwhernd/ [Source: http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/history/faculty/page36357.html]

Margaret Ellen Newell received her A.B. in History and Spanish from Brown University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Early American History from the University of Virginia. Her research and teaching interests include colonial and Revolutionary America, Native American History, economic history, material culture, and comparative colonial American/Latin American History. Her recent publications include *From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England* (1998) and *The Birth of New England in the Atlantic Economy, 1600-1770*.

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.

Professor Bryan Rommel-Ruiz has been teaching at The Colorado College since 1996 when he first arrived as a Minority-Scholar-In-Residence and Visiting Instructor in American History. He teaches a wide variety of courses in American History, African American History, US Southern History; World History, and Film and History. He has published articles and essays in these fields and is currently completing a book manuscript on Black Atlantic culture and politics in Rhode Island and Nova Scotia for The University of Pennsylvania Press. Professor Rommel-Ruiz is also writing a book manuscript on Charleston, South Carolina, and the Atlantic world that will be published by The University of Georgia Press. Additionally, he has a book-length manuscript under review about American Film and History.

Rowan University

Beverly A. Morgan-Welch serves as the chief executive of the oldest and most visible African American history museum in New England located on Bostons Beacon Hill and Nantucket. With four historic sites and collections that preserve the powerful past of African Americans from the Colonial Period through the Abolitionist Movement, the museum provides Black Heritage Trail tours, exhibits and education programs that illuminate and share a liberating American History. Beverlys career spans three decades of experience in not-for-profit management and corporate philanthropy. She has served as the Executive Director of the Greater Hartford Arts Council, Director of Development at the Wadsworth Atheneum, and Assistant Dean of Admission at Amherst College. Beverly was also the Manager of Community Relations at Raytheon, a member of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Hartford, and Secretary of the Connecticut Mutual Life Foundation serving the companys Corporate Social Responsibility Department. As a volunteer, her achievements include serving as Co-Chairperson of the Inauguration of the Honorable Deval Patrick, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and raising funds for the Bishop Desmond Tutu Southern African Refugee Scholarship Fund. A graduate of Smith College with a major in Theatre and Speech, in 2009, she received the Smith Medal awarded to graduates who, in the judgment of the trustees, exemplify in their lives and work the true purpose of a liberal arts education. Currently she is a Member of three distinguished history institutions: the Antiquarian Society, the Colonial Society of Massachusetts and the Massachusetts Historical Society. Beverly Morgan-Welch, the widow of the Reverend Mark Welch, resides in Andover, Massachusetts with their daughter, Alexandra.