A People and a Nation: A History of the United States

About Beth BaileyCarol SheriffDavid W. BlightFredrik LogevallHoward ChudacoffJane Kamensky

Jane Kamensky earned her B.A. and Ph.D. in history from Yale University. She is an American historian whose scholarship has covered the sweep of British colonial and United States history with books centered in the 17th 18th 19th and 20th centuries. Her many books include A REVOLUTION IN COLOR: THE WORLD OF JOHN SINGLETON COPLEY winner of the New-York Historical Societys American History book prize along with three others. For 30 years she worked as a history professor and higher education leader most recently as Trumbull Professor of American history at Harvard University and director of the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. In 2024 Kamensky became the president of Monticello/The Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Carol Sheriff is a Professor of History at William & Mary in Virginia where she has taught since 1993. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She specializes in 19th century United States social and cultural history with an emphasis on the period from 18151865 and she has an allied interest in early 20th century Civil War memory. She is completing a monograph on controversies surrounding 20th century history textbooks portrayals of the Civil War and Reconstruction; a piece of this project won the John T. Hubbell Prize from Civil War History. She has co-authored A PEOPLE AT WAR: SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANS IN AMERICA'S CIVIL WAR 18541877 and has written THE ARTIFICIAL RIVER: THE ERIE CANAL AND THE PARADOX OF PROGRESS 18171862 which earned the Dixon Ryan Fox Award from the New York State Historical Association and the Award for Excellence in Research from the New York State Archives. At William & Mary she has won several teaching awards. David W. Blight received his B.A. from Michigan State University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He is the Sterling Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery Resistance and Abolition at Yale University. In 2019 he won the Pulitzer Prize in history for his work FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM. His RACE AND REUNION: THE CIVIL WAR IN AMERICAN MEMORY 18631915 received eight awards including the Bancroft Prize the Frederick Douglass Prize the Abraham Lincoln Prize and four prizes awarded by the Organization of American Historians. Blights essays and op-eds have appeared in numerous journals and newspapers. From 20132014 he was the Pitt Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge in the UK. For the first seven years of his career Dr. Blight was a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint MI. In 2023 he served as president of the Organization of American Historians. Howard P. Chudacoff the George L. Littlefield Emeritus Professor of American History at Brown University was born in Omaha Nebraska. He earned his A.B. (1965) M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1969) at the University of Chicago. He has written MOBILE AMERICANS (1972) THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN URBAN SOCIETY (eight editions between 1975 and 2014) HOW OLD ARE YOU: AGE CONSCIOUSNESS IN AMERICAN CULTURE (1989) THE AGE OF THE BACHELOR: CREATING AN AMERICAN SUBCULTURE (1999) CHILDREN AT PLAY: AN AMERICAN HISTORY (2007) and CHANGING THE PLAYBOOK: HOW POWER PROFIT AND POLITICS TRANSFORMED COLLEGE SPORTS (2015). His articles have appeared in The Journal of American History The Journal of Family History Reviews in American History and The Journal of Sport History. At Brown he has served as Co-Chair of the Program in American Civilization Chair of the History Department Executive Committee of the Urban Studies Program and Faculty Representative to the NCAA. The National Endowment for the Humanities Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have funded his scholarship. A native of Stockholm Sweden Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University where he holds appointments in the Department of History and the Kennedy School of Government. He received his B.A. from Simon Fraser University and his Ph.D. from Yale University. He is the author or editor of 11 books most recently JFK: COMING OF AGE IN THE AMERICAN CENTURY 19171956 (2020) which received the Elizabeth Longford Prize and was The Times (UK) biography of the year and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His book EMBERS OF WAR: THE FALL OF AN EMPIRE AND THE MAKING OF AMERICA'S VIETNAM (2012) won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the Francis Parkman Prize in addition to other awards. A past president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) Logevall is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council of Foreign Relations and serves on numerous editorial advisory boards. Beth Bailey is Foundation Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Military War and Society Studies at the University of Kansas. She earned her B.A. from Northwestern University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Bailey is a historian of the 20th and 21st century United States whose research focuses on U.S. military war and society and the history of gender and sexuality in the United States. A prize-winning teacher who has worked in large state universities and liberal arts colleges she is the author or editor/co-editor of a dozen books the most recent of which is AN ARMY AFIRE: HOW THE US ARMY CONFRONTED ITS RACIAL CRISIS IN THE VIETNAM ERA. Her recent scholarly awards include the Higuchi-Balfour Jeffrey award for research in the humanities and social sciences the Society for Military Historys Samuel Eliot Morison award for lifetime achievement in military history and the Pitt Professorship in American History at Cambridge university (20252026). She currently serves by appointment of the Secretary of the Army as chair of the Department of the Armys Historical Advisory Subcommittee.