About the Authors

James A. Henretta is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle; The Origins of American Capitalism; and an edited volume, Republicanism and Liberalism in America and the German States, 1750–1850. His most recent publication is a long article, “Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America,” in Law and History Review, derived from his ongoing research on the liberal state in America, and in particular New York, 1820–1975.

Eric Hinderaker is Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Utah. His research explores early modern imperialism, relations between Europeans and Native Americans, and comparative colonization. His publications include The Two Hendricks: Unraveling a Mohawk Mystery, which won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize; Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800; and, with Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America. He is currently working on two books, one about the Boston Massacre and another, with Rebecca Horn, on patterns of European colonization in the Americas.

Rebecca Edwards is Eloise Ellery Professor of History at Vassar College, where she teaches courses on the Civil War era, the West, environmental history, and the history of women and gender roles. She is the author of, among other publications, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era; New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905; and the essay “Women’s and Gender History” in The New American History. She is currently researching the connections between westward expansion, high frontier fertility, and nineteenth-century political ideologies.

Robert O. Self is Professor of History at Brown University. His research focuses on urban history, American politics, and the post-1945 United States. He is the author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, which won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s. He is currently at work on a book about the centrality of houses, cars, and children to family consumption in the twentieth-century United States.