About our authors
David Goldfield is the Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. A native of Memphis, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and attended the University of Maryland. He is the author or editor of 16 books dealing with the history of the American South, including 2 works, Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region (1982) and Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture (1991), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history, and both received the Mayflower Award for Non-Fiction. Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History, which appeared in 2002, received the Jules and Frances Landry Prize and was named by Choice as an Outstanding Non-fiction Book. His most recent book is America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation (2011). Goldfield was the President of the Southern Historical Association (2012 to 2013) and is also the editor of the Journal of Urban History. He serves as an expert witness in voting rights and death penalty cases, as a consultant on the urban South to museums and public television and radio, and as an Academic Specialist for the US State Department, leading workshops on American history and culture in foreign countries. He also serves on the Advisory Board of the Lincoln Prize.
Carl Abbott is Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies and Planning at Portland State University. He taught previously in the history departments at the University of Denver and Old Dominion University, and held visiting appointments at Mesa College in Colorado, George Washington University, and the University of Oregon. He holds degrees in history from Swarthmore College and the University of Chicago. He specializes in the history of cities and the American West and served as co-editor of the Pacific Historical Review from 1997 to 2014. His books include The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities (1981, 1987), The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the Modern American West (1993), Political Terrain: Washington, D.C. from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis (1999), Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006), How Cities Won the West: Four Centuries of Urban Change in Western North America (2008), and Imagined Frontiers: Contemporary America and Beyond (2015). He has served as president of the Urban History Association and the Pacific Coast Branch-American Historical Association.
Virginia DeJohn Anderson is Professor of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She received her B.A. from the University of Connecticut and as a Marshall Scholar earned an M.A. degree at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Returning to the United States, she received her A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. A recipient of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is the author of New England's Generation (1991) and Creatures of Empire: People and Animals in Early America (2004). She has also published several articles on colonial history, which have appeared in such journals as the William and Mary Quarterly and the New England Quarterly. Her current book project is tentatively entitled The Martyr and the Traitor: The Perilous Lives of Moses Dunbar and Nathan Hale in the American Revolution.
Jo Ann E. Argersinger is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, where she won the George S. and Gladys W. Queen Award for Outstanding Teacher in History. She received her Ph.D. from George Washington University. A recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, she is a historian of US women, labor, and transnational history. Her publications include Toward a New Deal in Baltimore: People and Government in the Great Depression (1988), Making the Amalgamated: Gender, Ethnicity, and Class in the Baltimore Clothing Industry (1999), and The Triangle Fire: A Brief History with Documents (2009). She is currently writing a book entitled Contested Visions of American Democracy: Public Housing and Citizenship in the International Arena.
Peter H. Argersinger is Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, where he was named Outstanding Scholar by the College of Liberal Arts. He received his B.A. from the University of Kansas and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. He has been a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and he has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and other organizations. Among his books on American political and rural history are Populism and Politics (1974), Structure, Process, and Party (1992), and The Limits of Agrarian Radicalism (1995). His most recent book, integrating legal and political history, is Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America: The Politics of Apportionment (2012). His current research focuses on the political crisis of the 1890s.
William L. Barney is Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Pennsylvania, he received his B.A. from Cornell University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He has published extensively on nineteenth-century US history and has a particular interest in the Old South and the coming of the Civil War. Among his publications are The Road to Secession (1972), The Secessionist Impulse (1974), Flawed Victory (1975), The Passage of the Republic (1987), Battleground for the Union (1989), and The Making of a Confederate: Walter Lenoir's Civil War (1997). He is currently finishing an edited collection of essays on nineteenth-century America and a book on the Civil War. Most recently, he has edited A Companion to 19th-Century America (2001) and finished The Civil War and Reconstruction: A Student Companion (2001).
