Faculty

2024 Summer Conference Faculty

Tracy Baer has served as a Licensed Battlefield Guide since 2016 and is a native of Chambersburg, PA, where he lives with his wife and four dogs. Growing up in an area with a very rich Civil War history, including nearby Gettysburg, has given him many opportunities to study and research that pivotal time of the Nation’s past. Tracy is a past officer of the Cumberland Valley Civil War Roundtable and a member of the Gettysburg Civil War Roundtable. Since receiving his Gettysburg Battlefield Guide license, he has been able to meet people from all over and show them around that hallowed ground. Being able to touch people’s hearts by connecting them with the past, and sometimes reacquainting them with an ancestor who fought there is a very important aspect of his guiding. He also frequently speaks in person or remotely to organizations on various aspects of the war. Tracy also developed a Civil War related walking tour of his hometown along with a driving tour of Franklin County.

Bob Baumgartner is an adjunct professor of military history at Rowan University in New Jersey. He also is a tour guide aboard the Battleship New Jersey. He received his BA and MA at Rowan University and is a National Geographic Certified Educator. He has presented on Confederate Historiography as well as the Civil War in Film. He currently is part of a group of scholars researching extra-legal violence 1877-1882.

Sarah Kay Bierle graduated from Thomas Edison State University with a BA in History, serves as managing editor at Emerging Civil War, and works in the Education Department at American Battlefield Trust. She has spent years exploring ways to share quality historical research in ways that will inform and inspire modern audiences, including school presentations, writing, and speaking engagements. Sarah has published three historical fiction books and her first nonfiction book, Call Out The Cadets: The Battle of New Market, is part of the Emerging Civil War series.

Keith Bohannon is a professor of History at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton, Georgia. He is the author of numerous essays and articles, including "The Fatal Halts: Gettysburg, the Wilderness and Cedar Creek" in Gallagher and Cushman, editors, Civil War Writing New Perspectives on Iconic Texts (Louisiana State University Press, 2019).

James J. Broomall is an associate professor of history at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, WV, and the director of the George Tyler Moore Center for the Study of the Civil War. He is a cultural historian of the Civil War era and has published articles or essays in Common Place: The Journal of Early American Life, Civil War Times, Ohio Valley History, Gettysburg Magazine, Civil War History, and The Journal of the Civil War Era. He co-edited with William A. Link, Rethinking American Emancipation: Legacies of Slavery and the Quest for Black Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The University of North Carolina Press published his book, Private Confederacies: The Emotional Worlds of Southern Men as Citizens and Soldiers, as part of the Civil War America series in 2019.

Sarah Tracy Burrows is a graduate of Hobart and William Smith Colleges with a BA in English and History. She worked for CFO Publishing Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts, and is currently President, Board of Trustees, of the Jacob Leisler Institute for the Study of Early New York History, named for her eight-times great grandfather. Sarah's website is sarahtracyburrows.com.

Frances M. Clarke is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney in Australia. She is the author of War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago University Press, 2011). In collaboration with Professor Rebecca Jo Plant, she recently published Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, 2023). She is presently working on several other co-authored projects, including a multi-scholar collaboration that examines the aftermath of war from the Napoleonic era to the end of WWII and a study that analyses the roots and functioning of America’s military justice system from the 1770s to the 1980s.

Andrew Dalton is Executive Director of the Adams County Historical Society and Beyond the Battle Museum. A 2019 graduate of Gettysburg College, he has received project funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is the author of a book, Beyond the Run: The Emanuel Harmon Farm at Gettysburg (2013), as well as numerous journal articles. His work as a historian and nonprofit executive has been featured in The Washington Post, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Harrisburg Patriot, and Hallowed Ground Magazine, among other publications. He is a frequent contributor and guest at the American Battlefield Trust, Gettysburg National Military Park, and Gettysburg College. From 2020-2023, Andrew spearheaded successful planning and fundraising efforts for the historical society's $12 million debt-free capital campaign to build its new history center and museum in Gettysburg.

Thomas Flagel is a professor of History at Columbia State Community College in Tennessee. He has authored several books, including War, Memory, and the 1913 Gettysburg Reunion (Kent State University Press, 2019). Flagel earned his PhD in Public History from Middle Tennessee State University, an M.A. in International Relations from Creighton University, an M.A. in European History at Kansas State University, a B.A. in History from Loras College, and has studied at the University of Vienna. He works with several historic preservation boards and organizations and is a contributor to Virginia Tech's Essential Civil War Curriculum.

Zachery A. Fry is an associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, Fort Belvoir, and the author of A Republic in the Ranks: Loyalty and Dissent in the Army of the Potomac (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). He taught history previously at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point. Fry's research focuses on politics in Civil War armies, and his work has received the Coffman Prize from the Society for Military History, the Hay-Nicolay Prize from the Abraham Lincoln Institute / Abraham Lincoln Association, and the Hubbell Prize from the journal, Civil War History.

Brad Gottfried retired after spending 40 years in higher education. His journey began after he earned a Ph.D. in Zoology in 1976 and then he became a full-time faculty member. Brad taught full-time for eleven years at three colleges and then entered the ranks of the administration, rising to the position of the President of the College of Southern Maryland, serving in that position for eleven years until he retired in 2017. Brad has written 18 books on the Civil War and is a Certified Antietam Battlefield Guide and a Licensed Gettysburg Town Guide.

Christopher Gwinn is the Chief of Interpretation and Education at Gettysburg National Military Park, where he manages and oversees all aspects of the visitor experience and regularly leads interpretive talks and battlefield tours for the public. A ten-year veteran of the National Park Service, he is a 2006 graduate of Gettysburg College and holds a Masters Degree in Public History. He has worked as an interpretive Park Ranger at Antietam National Battlefield, Boston National Historical Park, and the National Mall and Memorial Parks, where he created some of the first public programming conducted at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. He is the author of numerous articles and journal entries on the Battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War era.

Scott Hancock is an associate professor of History and Africana Studies at Gettysburg College. After spending 14 years working with teenagers in crisis, he switched careers and received a Ph.D. in Early American History in 1999. This combination of careers fueled his desire to understand and tell the stories of people whom society and history typically discounts as troublesome or unimportant. He has focused mainly on African American experiences from the mid-1600s up to the Civil War, sometimes incorporating perspectives from the field of Law and Society or the discipline of Geography. Hancock has examined diverse topics, from how Black Bostonians in the nineteenth century used lower courts to manage difficult circumstances, to how escaping slaves and the underground railroad were some of the primary causes of the American Civil War and national emancipation. More recently, he has been exploring how whiteness, white supremacy and the systematic rejection of blackness were the unifying features of white American identity and politics across the North-South divide, and how that unity has been manifested on Civil War battlefields. Some of his work scholarly work has appeared in academic journals and anthologies, such as the forthcoming The Civil War and the Summer of 2020. A committed activist as well as a scholar, he has written for public audiences in mainstream local, regional, and national publications, and welcomes engaging with visitors to the Gettysburg battlefield.

D. Scott Hartwig was the supervisory park historian at Gettysburg National Military Park and retired in 2014 after a 34-year career in the National Park Service, nearly all of it spent at Gettysburg. He won the regional Freeman Tilden Award for excellence in interpretation in 1993, and was a key player for the design of all aspects of the current Gettysburg Museum/visitor center. He is the author of To Antietam Creek: The Maryland Campaign from September 3 to September 16, published in September 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press, and of I Dread The Thought of the Place: The Battle of Antietam and End of the Maryland Campaign, also published by Johns Hopkins in August, 2023.

Troy Harman is a Park Ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park. He has worked in interpretation for the National Park Service since 1984, beginning at Appomattox Court House National Historical Park before moving to Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park, Independence National Historical Park, then Gettysburg. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Lehigh University had has worked as an adjunct professor at Penn State University. His latest book, All Roads Led to Gettysburg: A New Look at the Civil War’s Pivotal Battle, was published by Stackpole Books in 2022.

James Hessler has worked as a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for two decades. Jim has authored or co-authored three full-length books on the Gettysburg campaign: Sickles at Gettysburg (Savas Beatie, 2009), Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg (Savas Beatie, 2015), and Gettysburg’s Peach Orchard (Savas Beatie, 2019). His books received several distinguished book awards. Jim currently co-hosts the popular Battle of Gettysburg Podcast. His other media appearances include Travel Channel, C-SPAN, NPR, PCN-TV, Breitbart News, and other outlets. He also authored articles in Gettysburg Magazine, America’s Civil War, and Hallowed Ground Magazine. He was one of the primary content designers for the American Battlefield Trust’s mobile Gettysburg application. Jim is a frequent speaker for Civil War Round Tables and other historical groups nationwide. In addition to Gettysburg, he leads tours at several other battlefields and historic sites across the country. He currently sits on the Board of Directors for the Little Bighorn Associates and the Executive Council for the Association of Gettysburg Licensed Battlefield Guides.

Harold Holzer is the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College in New York, a post he assumed in 2015 after 23 years as Senior Vice President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. For ten years (2000-2010, Holzer also served as Co-Chairman of the U. S. Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, appointed by President Clinton, and for the next six as Chairman of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. Before joining the Metropolitan in 1992, Holzer spent his early career as a journalist; a campaign and Congressional press secretary for Rep. Bella S. Abzug; an aide to New York Governor Mario Cuomo (with whom he co-authored two Lincoln books); and as spokesman for New York’s PBS station, WNET. In 2008, Holzer was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President George W. Bush. Holzer is the author, co-author, or editor of 55 books on Lincoln and the Civil War, has written more than 630 articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines, published 17 monographs, and contributed chapters or prefaces to 67 additional volumes. A recipient of numerous awards and honorary degrees from nine colleges and universities, his Lincoln and the Power of the Press (Simon & Schuster, 2014) won the 2015 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, as well as awards from Harvard and Columbia. His latest work is Brought Forth on this Continent: Abraham Lincoln and American Immigration (Dutton, February 2024). Holzer lectures widely throughout the nation, has served as a consultant for numerous documentaries, appears often on various TV networks, including CSPAN, CBS, PBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, and the BBC.

Ryan W. Keating is professor of History and Director of the Office of Student Research at California State University San Bernardino, where he teaches and researches on the Civil War era. He is the author of two books, Shades of Green: Irish Regiments, American Soldiers, and Local Communities in the Civil War Era (Fordham University Press, 2017), The Greatest Trials I Ever Had: The Civil War Letters of Margaret and Thomas Cahill (University of Georgia Press, 2017), and Yours Affectionately, Osgood: Colonel Osgood Vose Tracy’s Letters Home from the Civil War, 1862-1865 (Kent State University Press, 2022). A social historian, his work focuses on the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender in the 19th century. His current project, The Silent Service: Union War Widows and the Struggle of Race in the Post-Civil War Era explores the experiences of black and white Union war widows during the latter half of the 19th century.

Avery C. Lentz is a seasonal park guide at Monocacy National Battlefield, in Frederick, Maryland.  He holds a B.A. in History, with a minor in Civil War Era Studies, from Gettysburg College and an M.A. in Applied History from Shippensburg University.  While an undergraduate, Avery learned, through one of his research projects, that he had both Union and Confederate ancestors who participated in and died during the Battle of Gettysburg. Prior to his arrival at Monocacy, Avery worked as a seasonal park guide at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania National Military Park for three years, as well as a part-time employee at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, in Frederick.

Elizabeth D. Leonard is Colby College's Gibson Professor of History, Emerita. She earned her Ph.D. in U.S. History from the University of California, Riverside, in 1992 and is the author of several articles and seven books on the Civil War-era including: Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (W.W. Norton, 1995); All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (W.W. Norton, 1999); and Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky (UNC Press, 2011), which was named co-winner of the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize in 2012. Her most recent book, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (UNC Press, 2022) was also named a finalist for the 2023 Lincoln Prize, won the John L. Nau III Center for Civil War Studies 2023 book prize.

Robert S. Levine is Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He has wide interests in 19th-century American literature and culture and a particular fascination with the life and work of Frederick Douglass. His recent books are The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson (W. W. Norton, 2021), Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and The Lives of Frederick Douglass (Harvard University Press, 2016). His op-eds and essays have appeared in Time, the Washington Post, Literary Imagination, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Levine is the general editor of the world’s most widely-used anthology of American literature, The Norton Anthology of American Literature. He has been awarded fellowships from the NEH and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently working on a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe and African America. He lives in Ellicott City, Maryland; his author’s website is www.go.umd.edu/robertslevine.

Ashley Whitehead Luskey is the Assistant Director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, where she works with Gettysburg College students on a variety of original research-based Civil War and public history projects, coordinates the annual CWI summer conference, and gives tours of the battlefield to visitors. She also sits on the Board of the Lincoln Fellowship of Pennsylvania. 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 nineteenth-century American history from West Virginia University. Her academic interests focus on the long Civil War era, Southern history, cultural history, public history, and the intersection of history & memory. Prior to her arrival at CWI, Dr. Luskey worked for ten years with the National Park Service, including eight years as a park ranger and historian at Richmond National Battlefield Park. She has delivered numerous interpretive tours, lectures, and scholarly papers at educational institutions and public venues across the country, and has written articles on a variety of Civil War and public history-related topics for various magazines, journals, and blogs. She is the co-author of “From Women’s History to Gender History: Revamping Interpretation at Richmond National Battlefield Park,” which was published in the June 2016 issue of Civil War History. She is currently revising a manuscript tentatively entitled The Last Confederate Christmas: Leading Ladies, Social Politics, and Power in the Confederate Capital for publication.

Brian Luskey is Professor of History at West Virginia University, where he teaches courses on the Civil War Era, American cultural history, and Abraham Lincoln. He is the author of Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (UNC Press, 2020), and is currently writing two books: one about clerks in the Union Army and another about the Union’s culture industry.

David Malgee is an advanced collector of Gettysburg-related artifacts and owns one of the largest private collections of Gettysburg relics and identified items. He is currently working on a biography of Col. Eliakim Sherrill, mortally wounded at Gettysburg on July 3, 1863. A native New Yorker, David Malgee received his Bachelor’s degree in History from the State University of New York (Oswego) in 1977 and his Master’s degree in history from the University of Richmond in 1983. His Master’s thesis on Revolutionary War General William Campbell was the basis for a biography of the general published in 2023, by John Beakes. Although David owned a successful business in the Richmond area for 40 years, he remained active in the local history community, researching and writing Civil War Trails wayside exhibit texts and state historical markers. He also wrote a number of brochures relating to local Civil War history in the Petersburg/Bermuda Hundred area, and self-published two books, one being a church history and the other a biography of a jazz musician in Western New York State. David and his wife, Sherri, moved to Gettysburg in 2015. Since 2017 he has served on the Board of Directors of the Gettysburg Foundation and served as Interim President in 2020-2021. He is currently Vice-chairman of the board.

Jaime Amanda Martinez is Professor and Chair in the Department of History at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. She is the author of Confederate Slave Impressment in the Upper South (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) and an essay in the upcoming collection The Civil War and the Summer of 2020 (Fordham University Press, 2024). She is also working with the Digital Library of American Slavery to expand its slave deeds collection, has served on the North Carolina Historic Highway Marker Advisory Committee from 2016-2022, and is the Director of Children’s Choirs at Central United Methodist Church of Florence, South Carolina. Jaime speaks regularly at Fort Fisher and with historically-minded community groups in southeastern North Carolina, particularly focusing on the Confederate army’s use of black and native men as forced laborers; one of the outcomes of that forced labor, the Lowry War, is a topic of particular interest to her. Her talk stems from a current research project that looks more broadly at the experiences of southeastern native communities during the Civil War, examining they ways that they supported, resisted, or were forced to cooperate in the Confederate war effort. Jaime’s institution, UNC Pembroke, is an historically native-serving public university, founded in 1887 to train American Indian teachers, and granted its initial funding by the state in part as restitution for the North Carolina Home Guard’s execution of two Lumbee men in 1864. She is eager to bring outstanding examples of scholarship on the Native South’s Civil War into the conversation at this year’s Institute.

John Martin McMillan is a doctoral candidate in history at West Virginia University. His dissertation, “Feeding Confederate Virginia: The Stuff of Subsistence,” explores the food system in Virginia during the Civil War to explain the roles of non-human actors in feeding Black and white citizens and soldiers across the Old Dominion. The project works to recover experiences of hunger, spoilage, and starvation and to shift our attention to the materials of subsistence. He has published an article in West Virginia History that explores Union military policies towards civilians in the Mountain South. He also has written on the relationship between the natural environment and military operations during the war’s first campaigns in western Virginia in 1861.

Scott Mingus is a multiple award-winning author, as well as a retired scientist and executive in the global specialty paper industry. A graduate of Miami University of Ohio, he was part of the research team that developed the first commercially successful self-adhesive U.S. postage stamps, and he was a pioneer in the early development of bar code labels. He has written more than 30 Civil War and Underground Railroad books and numerous articles for Gettysburg Magazine and other historical journals. He has appeared on C-SPAN, C-SPAN3, PBS, PCN, and several other TV networks. Mingus writes a blog on the Civil War history of York County, PA, where he and his wife Debi live. He also has written six scenario books for miniature war-gaming. He received lifetime achievement awards from the York County History Center and the Camp Curtin Historical Society for his many contributions to local Civil War history. His books and war-gaming scenario books have received or been nominated for numerous national awards.

R. Isabela Morales is an award-winning author and public historian. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (Oxford University Press), is the winner of the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award and the 2023 Shapiro Book Prize. Dr. Morales is the Education and Exhibit Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM), central New Jersey's first dedicated Black history museum, as well as the Editor of The Princeton & Slavery Project at Princeton University. She received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University and her B.A. in history and American Studies from The University of Alabama, where she first began the research that would become Happy Dreams of Liberty.

Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of On A Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2013, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2014, with a second edition that includes a new preface released in June 2023. Murray is also the author of The Civil War Begins, published by the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History in 2012. Dr. Murray is currently working on a full-length biography of George Meade, tentatively titled Meade at War: The Military Life of George Gordon Meade. This is a comprehensive treatment of Meade’s life, with a focus on his military career in the Army of the Potomac. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming, “They Are Dead, And Yet They Live”: Civil War Memories in a Polarized America, published with the University of Nebraska Press. Murray is a veteran faculty member at Gettysburg College’s Civil War Institute and a coveted speaker at Civil War symposiums and roundtables. In addition to delivering hundreds of Civil War battlefield tours, Murray has led World War I and World War II study abroad trips to Europe. Murray worked as a National Park Service seasonal interpretive park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park for nine summers (2002-2010).

Rachael Barbara Nicholas is a PhD candidate studying nineteenth-century American history at West Virginia University. She has a B.A. in history and classics from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in public history from West Virginia University. Rachael has been a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park since 2018. She is also a graduate instructor at West Virginia University and a research assistant for the National Digital Newspaper Program

Laura Orr is the Director of Education at the Hampton Roads Naval Museum in Norfolk, Virginia. Prior to that, she worked at Fort Monroe’s Casemate Museum; at Stratford Hall, a historic home; and at Gettysburg National Military Park. Laura received her Bachelor’s degree in American Studies from Penn State University and her Master’s in History and Museum Studies from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Laura has appeared on several World War II documentaries on the Smithsonian Channel and Netflix. Her book about World War II dive bomber pilot CAPT Jack “Dusty” Kleiss, a member of USS Enterprise’s Scouting Squadron 6, was published in 2017. The book is entitled Never Call Me a Hero, and Dusty was the only pilot involved in the Battle of Midway to score three hits on Japanese carriers

Timothy J. Orr is Associate Professor of Military History at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. He is editor of Last to Leave the Field: The Life and Letters of First Sergeant Ambrose Henry Hayward and co-author of the national bestseller Never Call Me a Hero: A Legendary American Dive-Bomber Pilot Remembers the Battle of Midway. He is also the author of the three-volume Osprey Series, The Battle of Gettysburg, 1863. He has appeared on such television programs as Who Do You Think You Are? (TLC), World War II In Color (Netflix), Battle of Midway: The True Story (Smithsonian Channel), and Attack on Pearl Harbor: Minute by Minute (Netflix). For eight years, he worked as a seasonal park ranger at Gettysburg National Military Park.

Beth Parnicza is a public historian who has lived and studied Virginia's Civil War sites for over 10 years. A graduate of West Virginia University, she moved to the "other" Virginia to pursue her passion for Civil War History. Beth's research delves into cultural and military history, and she has written articles on the Battle of Fredericksburg, discussing emancipation with visitors, and an immediate postwar incident in Fredericksburg that reveals complexities of early Reconstruction. Her current research and writing project focuses on the Looting of Fredericksburg, Virginia before the December 1862 battle. She has held several positions with the National Park Service at a variety of historical and cultural sites, and she currently serves as the Branch Manager of Interpretation and Education at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields National Military Park.

Kevin Pawlak is a Historic Site Manager for the Prince William Office of Historic Preservation, where he manages Ben Lomond Historic Site and Bristoe Station Battlefield Heritage Park. He is also a Certified Battlefield Guide at Antietam National Battlefield and Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Kevin is the editor of the Antietam Institute's Antietam Journal. He is the author or coauthor of six books, including Such a Clash of Arms: The Maryland Campaign, September 1862, published by Casemate Publishers in 2023.

Ron Perisho originally hails from Illinois and worked as a Soils and Foundation Engineer in California for over 40 years before retiring to Gettysburg. He began studying and collecting photography in 1978, when he started his collection by purchasing two photographs by Ansel Adams. Initially, he collected images of nature, including geologic and engineering subjects by American artists such as Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Carlton Watkins, and Timothy O’Sullivan. Ron’s background and affinity for the technical aspects of photography led him to research 19th-century photographic processes. Ron has viewed collections at over 150 museums and private collections in order to study and learn various photographers’ work style, paper types, and printing methods. His interest in images of railroads and the Civil War, in particular, has increased over the last three decades. He is specifically enthusiastic about the ability to transfer stereographic cards to computerized 3D images, which has allowed people to view original Civil War (and other) images as the photographers originally intended. Ron also values traveling to the site of a chosen photograph to explore the photographer’s thought process and better understand the image.

Rebecca Jo Plant is professor in History at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Mom: The Transformation of Motherhood in Modern America (Chicago, 2010) and editor of the journal and database, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 to 2000 (Alexander Street Press). She has held fellowships from the American Association of University Women, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Australian Research Council. Recently, she and her coauthor Frances M. Clarke published Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford, 2023).

Ethan S. Rafuse received his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and since 2004 has been a member of the faculty at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, where he is a professor of military history. His publications include Robert E. Lee and the Fall of the Confederacy, guides to the Manassas, Antietam, and Richmond-Petersburg battlefields, From the Mountains to the Bay: The War in Virginia, January-May 1862, and the forthcoming U.S. Presidents During Wartime: A History of Leadership. In 2018-19 he was the Charles Boal Ewing Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Military Academy.

Angela M. Riotto is a military historian, who specializes in the American Civil War era, prisoners of war, memory studies, and gender studies. She received her PhD in American History at the University of Akron. She just finished work as an assistant professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Before joining the faculty at CGSC, she worked on Army University Press’s Films Team, producing documentary films to teach U.S. military history and current U.S. Army doctrine. She has published about multimedia learning tools and their use in the classroom with “Teaching the Army: Virtual Training Tools to Train and Educate Twenty-First Century Soldiers” appearing in Military Review. Some of her more recent publications include “‘As Happy a Man as Ever Wore ‘Confederate Grey’’: Confederate Ex-Prisoners of War and Their Narratives of Imprisonment, 1877-1890” in Useful Captives: The Role of POWs in American Military Conflicts with University Press of Kansas. She is currently working on a book manuscript, Beyond the Prison Pen: Union and Confederate Former Prisoners of War and their Narratives of Captivity, 1861-1930.

Aaron Sheehan-Dean is the Fred C. Frey Professor of Southern Studies and chairman of the History Department at Louisiana State University. He teaches courses on nineteenth-century U.S. history, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Southern History. He is the author of the award-winning The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2018), Why Confederates Fought: Family and Nation in Civil War Virginia (UNC Press, 2007), and most recently Reckoning with Rebellion: War and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (University Press of Florida, 2023).

Dana B. Shoaf is the editor of Civil War Times magazine, and can be seen on his magazine’s “First Monday” Civil War Times Facebook broadcasts. He frequently speaks on a variety of Civil War topics. He has appeared on C-span and has served as a Civil War consultant to the Smithsonian Institution, Library of Congress, and the National Archives. His most recent publication is the essay, “Let the Son of a Bitch Die,” in Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves, from the University of Georgia Press. Dana frequently gives battlefield tours and has previously been a member of the Civil War Institute faculty.

Timothy H. Smith has been a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg National Military Park for over 25 years and is Director of Education at the Adams County Historical Society. He has been involved with ACHS since the late 1980s when he began volunteering as a research assistant. Smith is the author of ten books and numerous articles about the Civil War, the Gettysburg Campaign, and a host of other local history topics. He is a historical consultant for the American Battlefield Trust and a frequent lecturer at Civil War Round Tables and Seminars, and appears regularly on the Pennsylvania Cable Network’s Battle Walks Series. Tim is recognized as one of the leading experts on the Battle of Gettysburg and all aspects of Adams County history.

Lewis Trott has worked as a Licensed Battlefield Guide at Gettysburg National Military Park since 2026. Originally hailing from Northern Virginia, he is a Retired Master Sergeant from the US Army, with 21 years of service, including combat tours during Operation Desert Shield/Storm 1990-1991 and Operation Iraqi Freedom 2008-2009. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in History and Masters Degrees in Library Science and History.

Michael Waricher is a professional artist and independent historian living in Stillwater, Oklahoma. A native of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, he holds a B.A. in History from Shippensburg University. Since 2012, he has produced a daily Facebook page, Michael Waricher’s Gettysburg Perspectives, combining his interest in photography and the history of the Gettysburg battlefield by using historical and modern images to study the evolving nature of the battlefield. His recent article, Evolution of a Battlefield, appeared in the Summer 2023 edition of Civil War Times magazine. 

Jonathan W. White is professor of American Studies at Christopher Newport University. He is the author or editor of 16 books that cover a variety of topics including civil liberties during the Civil War, the USS Monitor and the Battle of Hampton Roads, the presidential election of 1864, and what Abraham Lincoln and soldiers dreamt about. He serves as vice chair of The Lincoln Forum, and on the Ford’s Theatre Advisory Council, and in 2019 he won the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia’s Outstanding Faculty Award—the highest honor bestowed upon college faculty by the Commonwealth of Virginia. His recent books include A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House (Rowman & Littlefield), which was co-winner this year’s $50,000 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize; Shipwrecked: A True Civil War Story of Mutinies, Jailbreaks, Blockade-Running, and the Slave Trade (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves (University of Georgia Press, 2023), which he edited with Brian Matthew Jordan.

Ronald C. White is the author of two New York Times bestselling presidential biographies: A. Lincoln: A Biography (Random House, 2014), and American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant (Random House, 2016). He is also the author of Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (Simon & Schuster, 2006), which was a New York Times Notable Book; The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words (Random House, 2005)--a Los Angeles Times bestseller; and Lincoln in Private: What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President (Random House, 2021), which was the recipient of the 2021 Barondess/Lincoln award. He is a graduate of UCLA and Princeton Theological Seminary, and received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. White has taught at UCLA, Whitworth University, Colorado College, and Princeton Theological Seminary. He has lectured at the White House, and on Lincoln in England, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand. His most recent book is On Great Fields: The Life and Unlikely Heroism of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain (Random House, October, 2023).

Eric J. Wittenberg is an award-winning Civil War author. A native of southeastern Pennsylvania, Eric was educated at Dickinson College, the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He is a partner in the Dublin, Ohio law firm of Cook, Sladoje & Wittenberg Co., L.P.A., where he manages the firm’s litigation practice. Wittenberg is the author of 24 critically acclaimed books on the American Civil War, several of which have won awards, as well as more than three dozen articles published in national magazines. He is in regular demand as a speaker and tour guide, and travels the country regularly doing both. He serves on the boards of trustees of the Central Virginia Battlefields Trust and the Little Big Horn Associates, and often works with the American Battlefields Trust on battlefield preservation initiatives. He is also the program coordinator for the Chambersburg Civil War Seminars. His specialty is cavalry operations in the Civil War.

Jake Wynn is the former Director of Interpretation at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland. He is also a public historian sharing stories about Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region at wynninghistory.com and facebook.com/wynninghistory. He currently serves as the Senior Marketing and Communications Manager at Visit Frederick - Maryland.

Christopher Young is an interpretive park ranger at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, where he coordinates the park’s educational programming, provides interpretive coaching for park staff, and oversees the park’s website and social media accounts. Additionally, he conducts tours and special programs for students and adults about various aspects of the Chickamauga and Chattanooga Campaigns. He received his B.A. in history, his M.S.Ed. in general social science, and his Ed.S. in general social science from Jacksonville State University, in Jacksonville Alabama. Prior to joining the National Park service in 2009, he taught U.S. History and government/economics on the secondary level and educational technology and U.S. History to undergraduates at Jacksonville State University and at Chattanooga State Community College. America’s Civil War recently published one of his articles, “Escape from a Land of Tyranny and Oppression,” which explores the Confederate perspective of Clement Vallandigham’s controversial exile to the Confederacy during the 1863 Tullahoma Campaign. 

Cecily N. Zander is a historian of the Civil War era and the American West. She is an Assistant Professor of History at Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas, where she offers courses on American history, military history, memory, and popular culture. Her first book, The Army Under Fire: Anti-Militarism in the Civil War Era, will be published by Louisiana State University Press in February 2024. She also serves as Chief Historian at Emerging Civil War, a popular outlet for accessible writing about the Civil War era.