About our authors
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 The General vs. the President, Reagan, The Man Who Saved the Union, Traitor to His Class, Andrew Jackson, The Age of Gold, The First American and TR. 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 is 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. He received his 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 Patriots 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 Harvard University Press entitled An Appeal to Heaven: The American Revolution.
R. Hal Williams was professor of history emeritus at Southern Methodist University. He received his A.B. from Princeton University in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1968. His books include The Democratic Party and California Politics, 1880 to 1896(1973); Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (1978); The Manhattan Project: A Documentary Introduction to the Atomic Age (1990); and Realigning America: McKinley, Bryan, and the Remarkable Election of 1896 (2010). A specialist in American political history, he taught at Yale University from 1968 to 1975 and came to SMU in 1975 as chair of the Department of History. From 1980 to 1988, he served as dean of Dedman College, the school of humanities and sciences, and then as dean of Research and Graduate Studies. In 1980, he was a visiting professor at University College, Oxford University. Williams received grants from the American Philosophical Society and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he served on the Texas Committee for the Humanities.
Ariela Gross is 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. She has been a visiting Professor at Stanford University, Tel Aviv University, the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, the Université de Paris 8, and Kyoto University. Her book What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Harvard University Press, 2008, ppb. 2010), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2009, was awarded the J. Willard Hurst Prize for outstanding scholarship in sociolegal history by the Law and Society Association, the Lillian Smith Book Award for a book that illuminates the people and problems of the South, and the American Political Science Association’s award for the best book on race, ethnicity and politics. Gross is also the author of Double Character: Slavery and Mastery in the Antebellum Southern Courtroom (Princeton University Press, 2000; ppb., University of Georgia Press, 2006), and numerous articles and book chapters. She edited a symposium in the February 2017 issue of Law and History Review on Slavery and The Boundaries of Legality, Past and Present. Her research has been supported by a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, an American Council for Learned Societies Collaborative Research Fellowship from 2017 to 2019 and a Frederick J. Burkhardt Fellowship in 2003 and 2004, a Stanford Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences Fellowship, as well as an NEH Long-Term Fellowship at the Huntington Library. She is currently working on a comparative history of law, race, slavery and freedom in the Americas with Alejandro De La Fuente, the Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics at Harvard University.
