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David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for 13 years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002. Since 2004 he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Historical Society and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate both the Lincoln anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition.

Patrick Rael is a specialist in African-American history, who earned his PhD in American History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1995. He is the author of numerous essays and books, including Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North published in 2002, which earned Honorable Mention for the Frederick Douglass Prize from the Gilder Lerhman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Rael is also the editor of African-American Activism before the Civil War: The Freedom Struggle in the Antebellum North, and co-editor of Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African-American Protest Literature.

Within the general field of Early American history, John Wood Sweet's research focuses on the dynamics of colonialism and on the interplay of religious cultures. In *Bodies Politic* he explores the encounters of Indians, Africans, and Europeans in New England and argues that the racial legacy of colonialism shaped the emergence of the American North as well as the South. Sweet has also worked with other historians and literary scholars on the Jamestown colony and its broader cultural and international contexts. Now, he is beginning a new project on dreams, visions, apparitions, trances, and other out-of-body experiences-and how various groups of early Americans interpreted them.

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.

From 1993 to 1999, Dean Speth served as administrator of the United Nations Development Program and chair of the UN Development Group. Prior to his service at the UN, he was founder and president of the World Resources Institute; professor of law at Georgetown University; chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality; and senior attorney and cofounder, Natural Resources Defense Council. Throughout his career, Dean Speth has provided leadership and entrepreneurial initiatives to many task forces and committees whose roles have been to combat environmental degradation, including the President's Task Force on Global Resources and Environment; the Western Hemisphere Dialogue on Environment and Development; and the National Commission on the Environment. Among his awards are the National Wildlife Federation's Resources Defense Award, the Natural Resources Council of America's Barbara Swain Award of Honor, a 1997 Special Recognition Award from the Society for International Development, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Environmental Law Institute, and the Blue Planet Prize. Publications include *The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability*, *Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis of the Global Environment*; *Worlds Apart: Globalization and the Environment*; and articles in *Foreign Policy*, *Foreign Affairs*, *Environmental Science and Technology*, *the Columbia Journal World of Business*, and other journals and books.

Professor Silber specializes in the history of the United States between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century, including the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her scholarship focuses mainly on cultural and women's history, but the courses she teaches--on the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the American South--also examine society and politics in these periods. She is the author of numerous publications, including *The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 *(1993), which is an examination of Northerners' changing cultural attitudes towards the South after the Civil War, and *Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War *(2005). She also co-edited* Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War* (1992), *Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Homefront *(1996), and *Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the US Civil War *(2006). She has also consulted on a number of Civil War and women's history video projects and museum exhibits as well as served as Director of Women's Studies at Boston University.

Connie Crowley Ganser is the President of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Errors and Corporate Director, Performance Improvement and Compliance at Children's Hospital, Boston.

Lucian Leape is a health policy analyst whose research has focused on patient safety and quality of care. Prior to joining the faculty at Harvard in 1988, he was professor of Surgery and Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Tufts University School of Medicine and the New England Medical Center. Dr. Leape is internationally recognized as a leader of the patient safety movement, starting with the publication in JAMA of his seminal article, "Error in Medicine" in 1994. His subsequent research demonstrated the success of the application of systems theory to the prevention of adverse drug events. He has been an outspoken advocate of the nonpunitive systems approach to the prevention of medical errors and he has talked and written widely about the need to make patient safety a national priority. Dr. Leape was one of the founders of the National Patient Safety Foundation, the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Medical Error, and the Harvard Kennedy School Executive Session on Medical Error. Recent honors include the Distinguished Service Award of the American Pediatric Surgical Association, the Donabedian Award from the American Public Health Association, a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator's Award in Health Policy Research, and honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada. In 2003 he received the duPont Award for Excellence in Children's Health Care. In 2004, he received the John Eisenberg Patient Safety Award and Modern Healthcare named him as one of the 100 most powerful people in health care. Dr Leape is a graduate of Cornell University and Harvard Medical School. He trained in surgery at the Massachusetts General Hospital and in pediatric surgery at Boston Children's Hospital.

Linda Kenney remembers the day her life changed forever. It was November 18, 1999. At the time, she was a 37-year-old wife and mom of three and she was scheduled for a total ankle replacement. For Linda, operations were a way of life. Born with bilateral club feet, this was to be her twentieth surgery. She said goodbye to her husband and went to the pre-operative area where the block was performed. Moments later, she was near death, in full cardiac arrest. A rare and frightening complication had occurred. Anesthesia had entered Linda's blood stream and stopped her heart. A Code Blue was called, and when her cardiac function could not be restored, she was rushed to a cardiac OR where her chest was opened and her heart was connected to a bypass machine. It saved her life. When she was discharged, Linda was given instructions on how to manage her physical recovery and obtain help from a visiting nurse. But, she says, no one informed her of the emotional impact an event like this would have on her or her family. Linda then made some difficult decisions: She was not going to sue the doctor or the hospital as many people had assumed she would do, and she wanted to get back on the horse and reschedule her surgery. She also decided to contact Dr. van Pelt and ask him to join her for coffee so she could let him know that she didn't blame him and that she believed this was a truly unanticipated outcome. In June 2002, Linda founded Medically Induced Trauma Support Services (MITSS). Dr. Van Pelt helped get the organization started and is now chairman of the MITSS Board of Directors. Linda has worked with hundreds of patients and their families, as well as clinicians who have found themselves on the sharp end of an adverse event.

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.

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of *Democracy Now!*, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 750 TV and radio stations in North America. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the Alternative Nobel Prize for developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media. She is also one of the the first recipients, along with Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald, of the Park Center for Independent Medias Izzy Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone. Goodman is the co-author with her brother, journalist David Goodman, of three New York Times bestsellers, *Standing Up to the Madness: Ordinary Heroes in Extraordinary Times *(2008), *Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back* (2006) and *The Exception to the Rulers: Exposing Oily Politicians, War Profiteers, and the Media That Love Them* (2004). Goodman has received the American Women in Radio and Television Gracie Award; the Paley Center for Medias Shes Made It Award; and the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.