Major Problems in American History ─ To 1877: Documents and Essays

Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, Professor and Dwight E. Stanford Chair of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University, received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. Her areas of expertise include American diplomatic, economic, and cultural history. Her book, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps And The Spirit Of The 1960's (Harvard University Press, 1998), earned rave reviews from academic and popular readers alike. Professor Cobbs Hoffman has received fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Organization of American States, and served for six years as a member of the Historical Advisory Council to the U.S. Department of State. In 2004, she held the Mary Ball Washington Chair at University College Dublin through the Fulbright Program. She writes for both scholarly and popular periodicals and is currently authoring a new synthesis of American foreign relations for Harvard University Press.

Edward J. Blum, associate professor of history at San Diego State University, earned his B.A. in history from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. His first book, Reforging The White Republic: Race, Religion, And American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical Association, and the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools. His second book, W.E.B. DU BOIS, American Prophet (2007), was a finalist for the Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Both of these works received honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. In 2007, History News Network named Blum a "Top Young Historian" He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Constitutional Studies at George Washington University. Blum is currently writing a history of conceptions of evil during the Civil War era.

Jon Gjerde died in October 2008. He was Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982. His areas of expertise included nineteenth-century America with particular reference to immigration and religion, and he published some thirty articles on these subjects.