About our authors
Jacqueline Jones was born in Christiana, Delaware, a small town of 400 people in the northern part of the state. The local public school was desegregated in 1955, when she was a third grader. That event sparked her interest in American history. She received her undergraduate education at the University of Delaware and her Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her scholarly interests have evolved over time, focusing on American labor and women’s, African American and southern history. She teaches American history at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is the Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History and the Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas. Dr. Jones is the author of several books. In 2001, she published a memoir that recounts her childhood in Christiana: Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s. Her most recent book is titled A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama's America (2013). She is currently working on a biography of the radical labor agitator Lucy Parsons (1851 to 1942).
Peter H. Wood was born in St. Louis and recalls visiting the courthouse where the Dred Scott case originated. Emeritus professor of history at Duke University, he studied at Harvard and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1974, he published the pioneering book Black Majority, concerning slavery in colonial South Carolina. He recently earned the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award of the American Historical Association. Topics of his articles range from the French explorer LaSalle to Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. He has written a short overview of early African Americans, entitled Strange New Land, and he has published 3 books about the famous American painter Winslow Homer. Wood, who now lives in Longmont, Colorado, has served on the boards of the Highlander Center and Harvard University. His varied interests include archaeology, documentary film and growing gourds. He keeps a baseball bat used by Ted Williams beside his desk.
Thomas (“Tim”) Borstelmann grew up in North Carolina. His formal education came at Durham Academy, Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford University (A.B., 1980) and Duke University (M.A., 1986; Ph.D., 1990). An avid cyclist, runner, swimmer, and skier, he taught history at Cornell University from 1991 to 2003, when he moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to become the first E. N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History. Dr. Borstelmann’s first book, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (1993), won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations. His second book, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, appeared in 2001. He has won major teaching awards at both Cornell and Nebraska, and his most recent book is The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (2012). In 2015 he served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.
Elaine Tyler May developed a passion for American history in college when she spent her junior year in Japan. As an American student in Asia, she yearned for a deeper understanding of America’s past and its place in the world. She returned home to study history at UCLA, where she earned her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. She has taught at the University of Minnesota since 1978. Her widely acclaimed Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era was the first study to link the baby boom and suburbia to the politics of the Cold War. The Chronicle of Higher Education featured Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness as a pioneering study of the history of reproduction. Her most recent book is America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril and Liberation. Professor May served as president of the American Studies Association in 1996 and president of the Organization of American Historians in 2010.
Vicki L. Ruiz grew up in Florida. For her, history remains a grand adventure, one that she began at the kitchen table, listening to the Colorado stories of her mother and grandmother. The first in her family to receive an advanced degree, she graduated from Gulf Coast Community College and Florida State University, then went on to earn a Ph.D. in history at Stanford in 1982. She is the author of Cannery Women, Cannery Lives and From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in 20th-Century America. She and Virginia Sánchez Korrol have co-edited Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. She has participated in student mentorship projects, summer institutes for teachers and public humanities programs. A fellow of the Society of American Historians, Dr. Ruiz was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. Past president of the Organization of American Historians (2006), she is currently President of the American Historical Association, the flagship organization for historians across all fields with over 14,000 members. Since 2001, she has taught history and Chicano/Latino studies at the University of California, Irvine. The mother of 2 grown sons, she is married to Victor Becerra, an urban planner and community activist.
