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H.W. Brands was born in Oregon, went to college in California, sold cutlery across the American West, and earned graduate degrees in mathematics and history in Oregon and Texas. He taught at Vanderbilt University and Texas A&M University before joining the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin, where he holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in History. He writes on American history and politics, with books including Founding Partisans, The Zealot and the Emancipator, Traitor to His Class, and The First American. Several of his books have been bestsellers; 2, Traitor to His Class and The First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. He lectures frequently on historical and current events and can be seen and heard on national and international television and radio programs. His writings have been translated into Spanish, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Ukrainian.

T.H. Breen, currently the William Smith Mason Professor of American History at Northwestern University Emeritus, the James Marsh Professor At-Large at the University of Vermont, and the John Kluge Professor of American Law and Governance at the Library of Congress, received a Ph.D. from Yale University. At Northwestern, he was the founding director of the Kaplan Center for the Humanities and the Chabraja Center for Historical Studies. Breen has published 8 books on Early American and Revolutionary History, including Marketplace of Revolution, American Insurgents: American Partriots, and George Washington’s Journey: The President Forges a New Nation. His writings have won awards from the Historic Preservation Society, Society of Colonial Wars, and Society of the Cincinnati. Several foundations and libraries have supported his research: Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), Humboldt Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Colonial Williamsburg, and Huntington Library. Breen has held appointments at the California Institute of Technology, Chicago University, Yale University, Oxford University, and Cambridge University. He is now completing a study of the American Revolution for the University of Virginia Press entitled Discovering Independence: A Story of the American Revolution.

Ariela J. Gross is a Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. She was previously the John B. and Alice R. Sharp Professor of Law and History and Co-Director of the Center for Law, History, and Culture at the University of Southern California. Her most recent book, co-authored with Alejandro de La Fuente, Becoming Free, Becoming Black: Race, Freedom, and Law in Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana (Cambridge UP, 2020), was the winner of the 2021 Order of the Coif Award for the best book on law, and the John Philip Reid Award for the best book in Anglo-American legal history from the American Society for Legal History. Her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard University Press, 2008), was winner of the James Willard Hurst Prize from the Law and Society Association, the Lillian Smith Award for the best book on the US South and the struggle for racial justice, the American Political Science Association’s Best Book on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gross is also the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton University Press, 2000). She has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Harvard-Radcliffe Institute Joy Foundation Fellow, a Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Fellow, an ACLS Burkhardt Fellow, an ACLS Collaborative Research Fellow, an NEH Huntington Libraries Fellow, and winner of the Rutter Distinguished Teaching Award and the Mellon Mentoring Award at USC.

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