Joseph Crespino is Associate Professor of History at Emory University and received his doctorate from Stanford University. He is the author of In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (2007), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, the McLemore Prize, and the Non-Fiction Prize given by the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. He is currently at work on Strom Thurmond’s America, a political biography of the 1948 States Rights Democratic Party presidential candidate and longtime U.S. Senator from South Carolina. He recently co-edited The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism with Matthew Lassiter.

March 20, 2009

Elizabeth Varon is Professor of History at Temple University. She received a doctorate from Yale University and is the author of numerous articles pertaining to southern, Civil War, and women’s history. Varon is the author of We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (1998) and Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: Elizabeth Van Lew, a Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy, which won the Virginia Historical Society’s Richard Slatten Award for excellence in Virginia Biography, the People’s Choice Award for Non-Fiction given by the James Rivers Writers Festival and the Library of Virginia, and the Lillian Smith Award from the Southern Regional Council. Varon’s Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 was published in October 2008 by UNC Press 2007-8.

February 20, 2009

Scott Nelson is the Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He received a doctorate from the University of North Carolina in 1995. Nelson is the author of Iron Confederacies: Southern Railways, Klan Violence and Reconstruction(1999) and Steel Drivin’ Man: John Henry, the Untold Story of an American Legend(2006), which was awarded the Merle Curti Award for the best book in U.S. social and cultural history, the National Award for the Arts from the Arts Club of Washington, the Ansfield-Wolf Award for scholarship on race and diversity, and the Library of Virginia’s Award for non-fiction. Professor Nelson is also co-author with Carol Sheriff of A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America’s Civil War (2007).