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About the Author

Eric Foner is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, where he earned his B.A. and Ph.D. In his teaching and scholarship, he focuses on the Civil War and Reconstruction, slavery, and nineteenth-century America. He has served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association. In 2006 he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching from Columbia University. His most recent books are The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes and the Pulitzer Prize for History; Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, winner of the New York Historical Society Book Prize; The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution; and the upcoming Our Fragile Freedoms: Essays. Kathleen DuVal is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she teaches early American history. Her research focuses on how various Native American, European, and African people interacted from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Her recent books are Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution, which won multiple awards for her rich retelling of the history of the Revolutionary Era as experienced by enslaved people, Native Americans, and women living on Florida’s Gulf coast; and Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, which was awarded the 2024 Cundill Prize and the 2025 Bancroft Prize. DuVal’s additional awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Humanities, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship. She is also an Elected Fellow for the American Antiquarian Society and the Society of American Historians. Lisa McGirr is Professor of History at Harvard University, where she specializes in the history of the twentieth-century United States. Her research and teaching interests bridge the fields of social and political history and focus on collective action, state building, reform movements, and politics. Her most recent book, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State, won acclaim for excavating the significant but neglected state-building legacies of national Prohibition. Her award-winning first book, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right, investigated the social and regional basis of grassroots conservative politics in the post–World War II United States. She teaches a wide variety of courses on the history of the United States in the twentieth century.