Major Problems in American History, Volume I

About Edward BlumElizabeth CobbsJon Gjerde

Elizabeth Cobbs Professor and Dwight E. Stanford Chair in American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University has won literary prizes for both history and fiction: the Allan Nevins Prize Stuart Bernath Book Prize San Diego Book Award and Directors Mention for the Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. Her books include AMERICAN UMPIRE (2013) BROKEN PROMISES; A NOVEL OF THE CIVIL WAR (2011) ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE: THE PEACE CORPS AND THE 1960s (2000) and THE RICH NEIGHBOR POLICY (1992). She has served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History and on the Historical Advisory Committee of the U.S. State Department. She has received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Commission; Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; Organization of American States; American Philosophical Society; Rockefeller Foundation and other distinguished institutions. Her essays have been published in the New York Times Jerusalem Post Los Angeles Times Chicago Tribune China Daily News National Public Radio Washington Independent San Diego Union and Reuters. Her current project is a history of women soldiers in World War One. Jon Gjerde died in October 2008. He was Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California Berkeley and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982. His areas of expertise included nineteenth-century America with particular reference to immigration and religion and he published some thirty articles on these subjects. He also published FROM PEASANTS TO FARMERS: THE MIGRATION FROM BALESTRAND NORWAY TO THE UPPER MIDDLE WEST (1985) and THE MINDS OF THE WEST: THE ETHNOCULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL MIDDLE WEST 1830-1917 (1997) both of which won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award of the Immigration History Society for the best book in agricultural history. Edward J. Blum is a Professor of History at San Diego State University. A scholar of religion and race he is the co-author of THE COLOR OF CHRIST: THE SON OF GOD AND THE SAGA OF RACE IN AMERICA (2012) and the author of W. E. B. DU BOIS AMERICAN PROPHET (2007) and REFORGING THE WHITE REPUBLIC: RACE RELIGION AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM 18651898 (2005). An award-winning author and teacher Blum is currently at work on a project that explores issues of radical evil during the era of the Civil War. Blum has been a fellow with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University and with the National Endowment for the Humanities.