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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.

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.

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.

Frank McCourt taught in the New York City public schools for twenty-seven years, the last seventeen of which were spent at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. After retiring from teaching, Frank and his brother, Malachy, performed their two-man show, *A Couple of Blaguards*, a musical review about their Irish Youth. His memoir, *Angela's Ashes*, was published in 1996 by Scribner and has spent over three years on *The New York Times* bestsellers lists. There are nearly six million copies in print in North America alone and the book is available in eighteen countries. Frank McCourt was the winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) Award in Biography/Autobiography, the Boston Book Review's Non-Fiction prize, the ABBY Award, and The Los Angeles Times Book Award. *Time* magazine and *Newsweek* chose *Angela's Ashes*, as the best nonfiction book of 1996. The sequel to *Angela's Ashes*, *Tis: A Memoir*, was published by Scribner in September, 1999 and hit *The New York Times* bestsellers list at number one and remained on the list for 37 weeks. A feature film of *Angela's Ashes*, starring Emily Watson, was made by Alan Parker. Frank lives in Connecticut with his wife, Ellen.

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.

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*.