Ilyon Woo is the New York Times best-selling author of Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom, which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Woo has traveled the country to speak at bookstores, museums, schools, and book festivals, and she has been featured on such programs as NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and CBS Sunday Morning. She holds a BA in the Humanities from Yale College and a PhD in English from Columbia University.
Angela Esco Elder is an Associate Professor of History at Converse University (Spartanburg, SC). She is the author of Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss, as well as co-editor of Practical Strangers: The Courtship Correspondence of Nathaniel Dawson and Elodie Todd, Sister of Mary Todd Lincoln.
Christian Keller is Professor of History in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA, where he teaches courses on strategic theory, military history, national security policy, and the American Civil War. He is the author, co-author, or editor of six books, including the award-winning The Great Partnership: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and the Fate of the Confederacy, which won the 2020 Douglas Southall Freeman History Prize and was a finalist for the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Military History Award. He is currently writing a book on the applied history of the Civil War, entitled Take-Aways: The Practical Uses of Civil War History.
Colonel Michael “Mo” Becker served 28 years as a United States Marine Corps infantry officer after graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy, serving as a commanding officer of Marines at every rank from Second Lieutenant to Colonel. Becker’s assignments included duties in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region. He has been interviewed by ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and is featured in the National Museum of the Marine Corps.
Julie Mujic is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Global Commerce at Denison University. Dr. Mujic studies the Midwestern home front, especially focused on the intersection of social, intellectual, and economic history. Her current book project examines how the Midwestern economy grew during the Civil War in ways that affected college students in the region.
George C. Rable is Professor Emeritus, University of Alabama. He is the author of seven books on the Civil War era including Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! –which won the Lincoln Prize– and most recently Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War (Louisiana State University Press, 2023).
William C. “Jack” Davis is the author or editor of more than 50 books in Civil War and Southern history. He retired in 2013 as Executive Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies. His latest book, coedited with Sue Heth Bell, is The Whartons’ War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton, 1863-1865. Among his awards are a record fourth Jefferson Davis Award from the American Civil War Museum and the Richard Nelson Current Award from the Lincoln Forum.
Sue Heth Bell is the Whartons’ great-great granddaughter. While rummaging in her parents’ garage, she found the cache of letters that became the foundation of the book, The Whartons’ War: The Civil War Correspondence of General Gabriel C. Wharton & Anne Radford Wharton, 1863-1865, coedited with William C. “Jack” Davis. A proud Virginia Tech graduate, class of ‘88, she is donating the Wharton Collection papers to Virginia Tech.
Brian McKnight is Professor of History and a Founding Director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise. He is a specialist in contested and coerced loyalties and is the author of Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia, which won the James I. Robertson Literary Award; and Confederate Outlaw: Champ Ferguson and the Civil War in Appalachia, which won the Tennessee Library Award for best book in Tennessee history.
Paul Quigley is James I. Robertson, Jr. Associate Professor of Civil War Studies and Director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech. A native of Manchester, England, he is the author of Shifting Grounds: Nationalism and the American South, 1848-1865, winner of the British Association for American Studies Book Prize, the Museum of the Confederacy’s Jefferson Davis Award, and Phi Beta Kappa’s Albert Sturm Award.
