CWI Summer Conference Faculty
CWI 2027 Speaker Bios
Heath Anderson teaches American history and civics at Wright State University. A Virginia native, Heath caught the Civil War history bug at a young age through countless viewings of Hollywood’s 1951 adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage and battlefield treks around Petersburg and Richmond. He earned his M.A. in History from Virginia Commonwealth University and his Ph.D. in History from Mississippi State University and has published both academic and public-facing pieces on the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Civil Rights Movement. A first-time CWI attendee in 2025, he is thrilled to return in 2027 to lead a program on the XI Corps’ desperate fight on July 1.
Benjamin "BJ" Armstrong is the author or editor of seven books on maritime history, strategy, and the naval profession, including Small Boats and Daring Men: Maritime Raiding, Irregular Warfare, and the Early American Navy and 21st Century Mahan: Sound Military Conclusions for the Modern Era. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, earned his masters degree with Norwich University, and read for his PhD in War Studies at King's College, London. He teaches courses on the history of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, 20th century military strategy, and historical methods. His work has been recognized with the Lyman Book Award from the North American Society for Oceanic History and the Alfred Thayer Mahan Award for Literary Achievement from the Navy League of the United States, and he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Megan L. Bever is professor of history and chair of the Social Sciences Department at Missouri Southern State University. She received her PhD in history at the University of Alabama in 2014. She is the author of At War with King Alcohol: Debating Drinking and Masculinity in the Civil War and coeditor of The Historian behind the History: Conversations with Southern Historians and American Discord: The Republic and Its People in the Civil War Era. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Southern History, Civil War History, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, and the Journal of Sport History. Her current research focuses on substance use and regulation during the Civil War era. Dr. Bever lives in Carl Junction, Missouri, with her husband and two children.
William Blair is the Ferree Emeritus Professor of US History at Penn State, emeritus director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the university, and founding editor of The Journal of the Civil War Era. His five single-authored books deal with such subjects as the political battles over Emancipation and Memorial Day celebrations, treason during and after the Civil War, and documenting violence against Black people in early Reconstruction. His latest book, Arlington: An African American History, has been published by the University of North Carolina Press.
Robert Bland is an associate professor of History at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville. He is an historian of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States with an emphasis on the African American experience and the postbellum South. His first book, Requiem for Reconstruction: Black Countermemory and the Legacy of the Lowcountry’s Lost Political Generation traces the story of the cohort of teachers, missionaries, and political leaders who built South Carolina’s postbellum political world and reshaped the story of the nation’s second founding in the Black public sphere at the turn of the century. His academic writing has appeared in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Journal of the Civil War Era, American Nineteenth Century History, and the American Historical Review.
Keith Bohannon is a professor of history at the University of West Georgia. He is the author of numerous essays published by university presses and has given many Civil War battlefield tours during his time in academia and as a seasonal ranger and volunteer for the National Park Service.
Daniel Brennan is a Ph.D. candidate at West Virginia University studying nineteenth-century United States history. His dissertation project examines how Union chaplains drew upon their wartime experiences to shape and promote particular visions of morality, society, and religion during and after the Civil War. Daniel earned his B.A. from the University of Notre Dame in 2023 and has developed extensive experience in public history and historical interpretation. He has worked with a range of cultural and historical institutions, including the West Virginia Humanities Council, the Irish American Archives Society of Northeast Ohio, and the Benjamin Franklin House in London. He has also worked for several years as an interpretive ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park, following earlier service at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park. Daniel was also a High School Student Scholar at the CWI Summer Conference back in 2017!
James J. Broomall is the William Binford Vest Chair in the Department of History at the University of Richmond. He is a cultural historian of American history and has published works in Commonplace, Ohio Valley History, Gettysburg Magazine, Civil War History, Civil War Monitor, and Civil War Times. He co-edited with William A. Link Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and is the author of Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). Dr. Broomall has completed three major historic resource studies for National Park Service sites, which included extensive research about Black communities in Virginia and Maryland during the eighteenth- and nineteenth- centuries. He is currently completing a manuscript, Battle Pieces: The Art and Artifacts of the American Civil War Era, that uses material and visual culture to explore representations of conflict and death. Dr. Broomall frequently conducts guided tours of historic sites and Civil War-era battlefields. He directed the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University, in West Virginia, for nearly a decade and previously served on the faculty of the University of North Florida and Virginia Tech.
Alexandre F. Caillot works as a government analyst, having received his PhD in history from Temple University in 2023. He is the author of Late to the Fight: Union Soldier Combat Performance from the Wilderness to the Fall of Petersburg (2025) and is now completing a chapter examining the battlefield record of the 187th Pennsylvania Volunteer infantry Regiment for inclusion in an upcoming edited collection. Dr. Caillot has been interviewed on both Across the Fence, Vermont's longest-running television program, and the Civil War Talk Radio podcast. He has written articles featured by the Modern War Institute, U.S. Military History Review, and The Strategy Bridge, besides completing more than twenty scholarly book reviews for digital and print media. Dr. Caillot has also taught military history at Temple University and Norwich University.
Bryan Cheeseboro is a historian of the American Civil War. His activities include being a reenactor with Company B, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He has been featured on American Battlefield Trust’s Zoom Goes the History series and Antietam Live! programs. He has written for the Emerging Civil War blog. His presentations to the Rock Creek, DC Civil War Round Table include the programs Outside of Lincoln's White House: Civil War Men and Women of the DC Metro Area; and The 1st United States Colored Infantry. He was the subject of the article “The Hands-On Historian” in the Spring 2021 issue of Civil War Monitor magazine. In February 2022, he was the guest of John R. Heckman’s (The Tattooed Historian) YouTube channel to discuss his presentation Volunteers, Substitutes, & Drafted Men: Enlisting in the Civil War. At the 2025 CWI, he was a featured panelist in the discussion Doing Civil War History in Public. He is currently a Park Ranger with the National Park Service. His site is the Civil War Defenses of Washington.
John M. Coski earned his B.A. from Mary Washington College and worked summers at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park and Antietam National Battlefield. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from the College of William And Mary and worked summers at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. From 1988 to 2021 he worked at the Museum of The Confederacy / American Civil War Museum, serving variously as historian, director of library and research, and director of publications. His publications include Capital Navy: The Men, Ships, and Operations of the James River Squadron (Savas, 1996), The Confederate Battle Flag: America's Most Embattled Emblem (Harvard, 2005), and, most recently, An Officer of Six Navies: The Life of Confederate Commander Hunter Davidson (Savas, 2026), a project begun by co-author Charles T. Jacobs.
Laura June Davis earned a PhD from the University of Georgia and worked at Southern Utah University for seven years, earning the rank of Associate Professor, before assuming her current role as an Assistant Professor of History at Columbus State University. A scholar of 19th century naval warfare, she authored the Essential Civil War Curriculum's entry on "Naval Warfare." She has essays in both The Guerrilla Hunters: Irregular Conflicts During the Civil War edited by Brian D. McKnight and Barton A. Myers (LSU Press, 2017) and Common Sailors in the Civil War Era edited by David T. Gleeson, Wayne Hsieh, and Damian Shiels (Manchester University Press, forthcoming/2027). Her current manuscript project focuses on sabotage, irregular naval warfare, and masculinity during the Civil War. A passionate teacher, her scholarship on teaching has appeared in The Age of Revolutions and the Journal of the Georgia Association of Historians. She sits on the Board of Directors of the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, GA and is a proud former CWI high school scholarship student.
Molly Hutchins Goff was raised in Prairie Grove, Arkansas, a community rooted in Civil War history. She has dedicated her career to preserving and interpreting the region’s past, working with several Arkansas museums and heritage organizations. A founding member of the Prairie Grove Historical Society at age sixteen, Molly later served as its vice president and as curator and operational director of the Prairie Grove Heritage Museum. In 2022, she joined the Oklahoma Historical Society as a Historical Interpreter at Hunter’s Home in Tahlequah, Oklahoma’s only remaining antebellum plantation home. Her passion is sharing the stories of people who have been underrepresented or misrepresented in history, fostering a more inclusive understanding of the past. This passion led her to Honey Springs Battlefield, the site of the largest Civil War battle fought in Indian Territory, where she became director in 2024. In her free time, you can find her reading, playing musical instruments, baking, or exploring museums and antique stores with her husband Seth.
Mary T. Hall is an adjunct professor at St. Mary’s College of Maryland in historic St. Mary’s City, MD. A retired US Navy JAG commander, she has taught military history and political science courses at SMCM since 2005. She has a B.A. in History from Columbus State University, an M.A. in Military History from Norwich University, a J.D. from the University of Georgia, and an LL.M. in Military Law from The Judge Advocate General’s School of the Army. She is the author/editor of From a Yankee to a Rebel Diary: The Collective Civil War Diaries of Private George Washington Hall, 14th Georgia Infantry, and Private Jacob L. Elsesser, 9th Pennsylvania Reserves. Hall is the great-granddaughter of George Washington Hall, one of the two soldiers who wrote in the blue-gray diary on which she based her book. She is also the author of articles on the permissible uses of ruse in naval warfare, U.S. amphibious operations during the invasion of Biak in May 1944, and the utilization of the militia in the Maryland palatinate between 1634-1646.
Jeffrey J. Harding, a historian, author, and Licensed Battlefield Guide Emeritus at Gettysburg National Military Park, thrives on solving historical mysteries. He previously led the quest to locate a “missing” pen once used by Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz to sign the Japanese Instruments of Surrender on September 2, 1945. His highly acclaimed book, Gettysburg’s Lost Love Story: The Ill-Fated Romance of General John Reynolds and Kate Hewitt, reveals Kate Hewitt’s true life story and her ultimate fate - mysteries that had haunted historians for decades. And Jeff’s latest book, The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign (co-authored with meteorologist Jon Nese), details how extreme weather conditions such as triple digit heat indices shaped the campaign and battle in ways previously unknown to historians.
Callie Hawkins is the CEO and Executive Director at President Lincoln’s Cottage, a role she assumed in 2023 after serving as a staff member there since 2009 and as the longtime Director of Programming at the Cottage. She is responsible for innovative leadership of the National Monument and for providing overall direction for all aspects of operations. Additionally, Callie co-hosts Q&Abe, the site’s award-winning podcast, which has reached thousands of people in more than 80 countries. During her tenure, Callie has spearheaded projects that won national and international recognition, including awards from the American Association for State and Local History, American Alliance of Museums, National Council on Public History, and a presidential medal in 2016 for Students Opposing Slavery, a youth education program for high school students dedicated to raising awareness about modern slavery.
Michelle A. Krowl is the Civil War and Reconstruction specialist in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. She received a B.A. in History from the University of California, Riverside, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of several articles and books on topics relating to the Civil War, as well as Quantico, Virginia and the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. She has worked as a library assistant at the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., an assistant professor at Northern Virginia Community College, and as a research assistant for historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Andrew F. Lang is Professor of History and Constitutional Studies in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book, A Contest of Civilizations: Exposing the Crisis of American Exceptionalism in the Civil War Era (UNC Press), listed as finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. A past recipient of the Society of Civil War Historians' Tom Watson Brown Book Award and a vice president of the Abraham Lincoln Association, he is now writing on Lincoln and the ancient virtue of gratitude.
Kevin M. Levin is an historian and educator based in Boston. He is the author of three books, including Remembering the Battle of the Crater: War as Murder, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, and most recently, A Glorious Fate: The Life and Legacy of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Atlantic, and The Boston Globe. He is currently working on a book about the Gettysburg Campaign from the perspective of the thousand of enslaved laborers that traveled with the Confederate army into Pennsylvania. You can find out more about this project at his newsletter/blog, Civil War Memory.
Peter C. Luebke has been active in the field of public history for many years, starting with his work on the integrated cultural resource management plan for Commander, Fleet Activities, Yokosuka Japan in 2003. Since then, he has been a historian for the iconic Virginia Historic Highway Marker Program at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, an editorial assistant for Encyclopedia Virginia, and most recently, a historian at the Naval History and Heritage Command. He has published widely on many topics in military and naval history—from Colonel George Washington’s service during the French-Indian War to US Navy electronic warfare in the Korean War. He is editor, co-editor, and co-author of multiple books, including From Western Virginia with Jackson to Spotsylvania with Lee: The Civil War Diaries and Letters of St. Joseph Tucker Randolph and The Autobiography of Rear Admiral John A. Dahlgren.
Ashley Whitehead Luskey has served since 2017 as the Assistant Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. She teaches classes in Civil War and Public History and oversees the CWI’s Student Fellows Program and First Year Experience Program, in which she facilitates battlefield experiences, workshops, behind-the-scenes museum tours, and discussions with practicing public historians from various cultural institutions, and mentors students on a variety of research and writing projects. She also spearheads the CWI’s annual June conference, during which she regularly provides lectures and battlefield tours, and has served as a faculty mentor for three separate summer Kolbe Student Fellowship projects. Ashley received her B.A. in History from the College of William and Mary, and holds both an M.A. in History, with a concentration in Public History, and a Ph.D. in History from West Virginia University. She is an active public historian with over 20 years of professional experience in interpretation, preservation, digital & oral history, archival work, & education. Prior to arriving at CWI, she spent 10 years working for the National Park Service as a front-line ranger in the Interpretation Division, including 8 years at Richmond National Battlefield Park. Ashley served on the Board of Directors for the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania for 9 years, assisting with Dedication Day ceremonies in Gettysburg National Cemetery every November 19th and providing youth education and outreach about Abraham Lincoln and his legacy. She was recently appointed to the board of judges for the new E. James Morton Book Award for Excellence in Civil War Cartography, serves on the editorial board of Gettysburg Magazine, and recently was named to the Antietam National Battlefield Wayside Project Historians’ Advisory Board.
Debra Sandoe McCauslin is a researcher, author, educator, documentary filmmaker, tour operator and public historian whose work focuses on African American history, slavery, freedom-seeking, the Underground Railroad, and the Civil War era in Gettysburg and South Central Pennsylvania. Sandoe McCauslin is a relative of George Washington Sandoe, the first to fall at Gettysburg. This personal connection deepens her commitment to preserving and interpreting the history of Gettysburg and the people whose lives were shaped by the Civil War. McCauslin is the author of Reconstructing the Past: Puzzle of a Lost Community, her extensively researched history of Yellow Hill, a nineteenth-century African American community in Adams County. Her research helped reveal the Gettysburg-area roots of Anna Deavere Smith, in connection with genealogical research by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and McCauslin was involved in bringing that history to light. Her Yellow Hill research also established that Adams County men served in the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, bringing an important connection between Adams County and one of the most celebrated African American regiments of the Civil War into the county’s historical record. McCauslin also successfully nominated four sites in Adams County to the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom, helping secure national recognition for places connected to the history of freedom-seeking and the Underground Railroad in the county. Through For The Cause Productions, McCauslin creates documentaries, educational programs, lectures, and historical tours. She created two signature Gettysburg tours: The Underground Railroad in Gettysburg and African American Voices of Gettysburg, bringing overlooked African American stories directly into the landscape where they unfolded. Her documentary work includes the 12-minute documentary Gettysburg Revisited, as well as Adams County USA, which she created with filmmaker Jake Boritt. Her work combines primary-source research, genealogy, archival investigation, oral history, documentary filmmaking, and public history to place African Americans at the center of the broader story of Gettysburg, the Civil War, slavery, freedom, and citizenship. Watch Gettysburg Revisited on YouTube.
Peter Miele is Senior Project Leader at Susquehanna National Heritage Area, directing the development of the Susquehanna Discovery Center & Heritage Park in Wrightsville, PA, and an adjunct faculty member at York College of Pennsylvania. He earned his BA in History and Secondary Education from Ramapo College of New Jersey, an MA in Applied History from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Penn State, Harrisburg. His scholarship has appeared in Pennsylvania History and Gettysburg Magazine. Currently, he is editing his dissertation, “An Enduring Light of Fellowship and Unity”: Gettysburg’s Eternal Light Peace Memorial in History, Memory, and Myth, for publication.
Jennifer M. Murray is the Dennis E. Frye Endowed Chair in Civil War Studies and Director of the Civil War Center at Shepherd University. Her most recent publication is They Are Dead, And Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America (2026), co-edited with Dr. John Kinder. She is also the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2023 (2014; second edition in 2023). Murray is finishing a full-length biography of General George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War. She is also co-editing volume on the Army of the Potomac, entitled, This Glorious Army: Reconsidering the Army of the Potomac, with Dr. Kenneth Noe. Prior to joining the faculty at Shepherd, Murray taught at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. A native of Maryland, Murray worked as a seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers.
Jon Nese is a Teaching Professor and Associate Head for Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Meteorology and Atmospheric Science at Penn State. He also oversees the department's Weather and Climate Communications Group which is responsible for Weather World, the department’s long-running weekday weather magazine show. Before joining the Penn State faculty, Dr. Nese was an on-air storm analyst at the Weather Channel, and prior to that, chief meteorologist at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. Dr. Nese has co-authored three books: The Philadelphia Area Weather Book, which was awarded the 2005 Louis J. Battan Author’s Award from the American Meteorological Society; a college-level introductory textbook: A World of Weather: Fundamentals of Meteorology, now in its sixth edition; and most recently, The Weather Gods Curse the Gettysburg Campaign (with Licensed Gettysburg Battlefield Guide Jeffrey Harding).
Timothy J. Orr is Associate Professor of Military History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He received his bachelor’s degree at Gettysburg College and his Ph.D. at the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of several essays about the Army of the Potomac, and also the editor of Last to Leave the Field: The Life and Letters of First Sergeant Ambrose Henry Hayward, the author of the three-volume Battle of Gettysburg Series by Osprey Publishing, and the co-author of the national bestseller Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway. His current book project is entitled, No Routine Flights: U.S. Navy Dive-Bomber Pilot Donald Kirkpatrick, Jr. and the Pacific War. For eight years, Dr. Orr worked as a seasonal ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park. He has also appeared on several television shows: Who Do You Think You Are? (TLC), Battle of Midway: The True Story (Smithsonian Channel), The Greatest Events of World War II in Colour (Netflix), and Attack on Pearl Harbor: Minute by Minute (Netflix).
Jared Peatman is a graduate of Gettysburg College with a Master’s degree from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. from Texas A&M. He is the author of the recently leased A Hell of a Regiment: To Gettysburg and Beyond with the Twentieth Maine, which was published by Stackpole Books in June of 2026. He is also the author of The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, a project for which he was named the Organization of American Historians and Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission Doctoral Fellow and in 2012 received the Hay-Nicolay Dissertation Prize for the best work on Abraham Lincoln or the Civil War. In his day job, Jared provides training events that use history as a metaphor to examine current leadership and performance challenges. He is the founder and president of Four Score Consulting and a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Excellence in Public Leadership. You can read more about his programs at www.historyleadership.com.
Steve T. Phan is a Park Ranger and serves as the Chief of Interpretation at Camp Nelson National Monument. He recently served as the historian at the Civil War Defenses of Washington. He has also worked at Gettysburg National Military Park, Richmond National Battlefield Park, Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Stones River National Battlefield, Rock Creek Park, and Charles Young Buffalo Soldiers National Monument. He is the author of articles about Asians and Pacific Islanders in the Civil War and the Defenses of Washington for numerous publications and contributed an essay to They Are Dead and Yet They Live: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, published by the University of Nebraska Press (2026). He was nominated for the National Park Service’s Freeman Tilden Award for Excellence in Interpretation for the National Capital Region in 2019 and 2020, and the Excellence in Interpretation Individual Award for the Southeast Region in 2025 and 2026. He holds a Master’s degree in American History from Middle Tennessee State University.
Michael Pierson teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His books include two Civil War military histories: Mutiny at Fort Jackson: The Untold Story of the Fall of New Orleans; and Lt. Spalding in Civil War Louisiana, an experiment in trying to write a biography of a person who left us only one long, funny letter and died at 23. His new book, Charles Sumner, Slavery, Sexual Assault, and the 1856 Election, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in early 2027. He was graduated from Gettysburg College in 1986.
Lindsay Rae Smith Privette is Associate Professor of History at Anderson University in Anderson, South Carolina. Born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, Lindsay developed her interest in Civil War history at Vicksburg National Military Park where she later went on to work. She received her BA in History from Baylor University and her MA and PhD from the University of Alabama. The Surgeon’s Battle: How Medicine Won the Vicksburg Campaign and Changed the Civil War is her first book.
Carol Reardon is George Winfree Professor Emerita of History at Penn State University and, in retirement, served as an adjunct Professor of History and Civil War Era Studies at Gettysburg College. She authored Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (University of North Carolina Press, 1997), A Field Guide to Gettysburg (2013), and numerous other military history works. She currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Gettysburg Foundation.
Elizabeth M. Reese is the Senior Manager of Public Programs & Interpretation at Woodlawn & Pope-Leighey House. As a historian, her research is focused on public memory, family ties, and grief across the 19th century. Her work has appeared in TIME, the Journal of the American Revolution, Imprint, and on C-SPAN. Her first book, Marquis de Lafayette Returns: A Tour of America’s National Capital Region, was publised in 2024 by The History Press. She is currently working on a book exploring how Edwin Booth's grief transformed American theatre and contributed to post-war national reconciliation. Elizabeth holds an M.A.in American History from Gettysburg College. For more information, visit elizabethmreese.com.
Michael Rupert is a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg. He has worked in automotive service and management south of Pittsburgh, PA for almost 40 years. The past had become the present while on a family trip to the Gettysburg battlefield in 2001. Since then, countless seminars, lectures, conferences, and battle walks made “it as real as something that happened last week”. Mike describes himself as a self-taught student with an unending quest to keep the memory alive for future generations. In 2017, Mike contributed essays for Jay Jorgensen's book TOP TEN AT GETTYSBURG, and in 2018, he successfully completed all testing to become a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg National Military Park. As an LBG, he leads all types of battlefield tours – both large and small groups, including specialty tours. Mike also recently joined the faculty of two Gettysburg Battlefield Leadership Development companies. He has appeared multiple times on the Addressing Gettysburg podcast and has produced Gettysburg Battle walks for the Association of Licensed Battlefield Guides since 2019. Michael was born and raised in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, PA. Married for 37 years to his wife, Susan, he has two grown children. In the colder months, he lives in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA and resides in Littlestown, PA during the Guide season.
Barbara Sanders has been Gettysburg National Military Park's Education Specialist since 1999, where she oversees thousands of students visiting the park each year – whether in-person or on virtual field trips. In addition, the park annually offers professional development opportunities for teachers, classroom loan materials, teacher-led History Labs, family reading and art programs and more. Barbara was the educator on the project team for the planning and construction of the visitor center and museum, which included the concept and design for exhibits, films and computer interactive elements. Barbara began her career within the museums of Philadelphia, and then moved to Washington, D.C. to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from The George Washington University’s Museum Education program. She was awarded the National Park Service Northeast Region’s Freeman Tilden award which recognizes creativity, advancement and ingenuity in the field. She lives in Gettysburg with her husband, historian Scott Hartwig, and their “battlefield Brittany” Hazel.
Robert M. Sandow is Professor of History at the Lock Haven campus of Commonwealth University of Pennsylvania. A 1992 graduate of Gettysburg College, he earned his Ph.D. in History from Penn State University. He is the author of Deserter Country: Civil War Opposition in the Pennsylvania Appalachians (Fordham University Press) and editor of Contested Loyalty: Debates over Patriotism in the Civil War North (Fordham University Press), as well as numerous essays on Northern dissent, partisan politics, loyalty, and the Civil War home front. His research explores the ways ordinary Americans experienced and contested the political, social, and cultural demands of war.
Rachel A. Shelden is an associate professor of history and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Penn State University. She is the author of Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War (UNC Press, 2013) and the co-editor with Gary Gallagher of A Political Nation; New Directions in Mid-Nineteenth Century American Political History (UVA Press, 2012). Her newest book, The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History (UNC Press, 2026) explores the Supreme Court's original relationship to politics and the political lives of nineteenth-century justices. In addition to writing for news outlets such as the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Philadelphia Inquirer, Shelden is a member of the Brennan Center’s Historians Council on the Constitution and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of American History, Journal of American Constitutional History, Journal of Supreme Court History, and Ohio Valley History.
Dana B. Shoaf is the Director of Interpretation at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, where he is helping direct the redesign and reinterpretation of all of the Museum’s galleries. He can be seen on YouTube representing the NMCWM and also in partnership with the Gettysburg Foundation. Prior to joining the Museum in November 2023, he served for 15 years as the editor and public face of Civil War Times magazine. He has spent his life pursuing his historical passions. After graduate school, Shoaf began his career working for Time-Life, Inc., as a writer and researcher on the Voices of the Civil War series and has published articles and essays on Civil War topics. His most recent ‘essay, “‘Let the Son of a Bitch Die’: An Abandoned Graveyard Reveals a Sad Story of Murder,” was published in Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves by the University of Georgia Press. A frequent speaker at conferences and seminars, Shoaf has been interviewed on National Public Radio and appeared on C-Span. He has been invited to serve as a consultant for a number of projects for the National Archives, the Smithsonian Institution, the Washington Post, and the National Park Service. He has spoken at the Lincoln Forum and led battlefield tours for organizations such the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War at Shepherd University and Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute. Shoaf is also an avid student and collector of Civil War and 19th-century occupational photography, and frequently uses his images in his presentations. He and his wife restored and sold an 1830s stone house, and they are currently restoring another stone house built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, where they reside with three indulged cats and a doted-upon dog.
Jennifer Van Horn holds a joint appointment as professor in the departments of Art History and History at the University of Delaware where she teaches courses in Art of the United States, Material Culture Studies, and Museum Studies. She is the author of Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art During Slavery (2022) and The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (2017) as well as co-editor with Jaipreet Virdi of The Disabled Gaze: Multi-Sensory Perspectives on Art, Bodies and Objects (forthcoming 2027).
Matt Warshauer is a CSU (CT State University) Distinguished Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University, where he received his bachelor’s degree in American Studies. Fascinated by what he calls “the American paradox,” the ever-challenging conundrum between the nation’s founding document and the difficulties of pursuing essential ideas of freedom, Warshauer pursued an MA and Ph.D. at Saint Louis University. He has spent the last 40 years exploring the great American experiment in self-government. The author of six books and countless articles and reviews, Warshauer has written extensively on Andrew Jackson, slavery and the Civil War, and, most recently, 9/11 and how the most important and devastating event of the 21st century has impacted the world in which we live. Creating and Failing the 9/11 Generation: The Real Story of September 11 was released from Routledge Press. He is currently studying the Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War era, as the 250th anniversary allows the nation to reflect on the origins and meaning of America. With a unique ability to draw in his audience, Warshauer guides listeners through the complexities of American political and constitutional history so that we can all think more clearly and gain a better of understanding of our role as citizens.
Dan Welch is a park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park and the editor of Gettysburg Magazine. He also has served as the Education Programs Coordinator with the Gettysburg Foundation, and as an instrumental music teacher with several public school districts in northeast Ohio. Dan is the co-author of several works on Gettysburg, Antietam, and the 1776 New York Campaign.
Jonathan W. White is the Patrick C. Oxford Professor in the School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author or editor of 24 books that cover a variety of topics related to Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War. Among his awards are the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award (2019), the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Prize (2015), the University of Maryland Alumni Excellence Award in Research (2024), the Jack Miller Center’s Teaching Excellence Award (2024), and the Penn State History Department Outstanding Alumni Award (2025). His recent books include A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (2022), which was co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (2023); A Great and Good Man: Rare First-hand Accounts and Observations of Abraham Lincoln (2024); an exciting children’s book, My Day with Abe Lincoln (2024); Measuring the Man: The Writings of Frederick Douglass on Abraham Lincoln (2025); and Why Lincoln: Preserving an American Legacy (2026). In 2027 he will publish A Portrait of Abraham Lincoln: Eyewitness Accounts. He previously taught at Christopher Newport University for seventeen years.
Cooper Wingert’ is an assistant professor of history at Fordham University. His research and writing explore the American Civil War, slavery and emancipation, and the 19th century United States, with a particular interest in how Americans negotiated the functioning of power and authority on the ground. His current book project charts the wartime precursors to the Freedmen’s Bureau. It illuminates how enslaved people saw opportunity in the chaos and confusion of wartime federal authority, using their experience with law and legal knowledge to push the Union Army’s provost marshals, or military police, well past the technical limits of federal antislavery policies enacted in Washington. Dr. Wingert has written extensively on the antebellum US, the Underground Railroad, and the coming of the Civil War. He is also the author of several books exploring the Civil War history of his native Pennsylvania, including Slavery and the Underground Railroad in South Central Pennsylvania.
Melissa A. Winn is the Director of Marketing and Communications for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Previously, she was the Marketing Manager for the American Battlefield Trust, and Director of Photography for HistoryNet, the publisher of nine history-related magazines, including America’s Civil War, American History, and Civil War Times, for which she served as the primary photo researcher, photographer, and a regular writer. She is a Senior Editor for Military Images magazine, with a regular column focused on women and the Civil War; Editor of Shavings, the member newsletter of the Early American Industries Association; a member of the Board of Directors of the Civil War Roundtable Congress; and President of the Bull Run Civil War Round Table. Melissa is also a member of the Professional Photographers Association, Authors Guild, Women's Relief Corps, and the Center for Civil War Photography.
Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai is the Peter Drummey Chief Historian at the Massachusetts Historical Society. An historian of the American Civil War Era, he is the author of Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. He also co-edited the volumes So Conceived and So Dedicated: Intellectual Life in the Civil War Era North and Wars Civil and Great: The American Experience in the Civil War and World War I. He was Associate Professor of History at Angelo State University prior to joining the MHS staff as Director of Research in 2019.