Harold M. Hyman, William P. Hobby Professor of History at Rice University, received his B.A. from the University of California at Los Angeles, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. Before joining the Rice University faculty, Hyman taught at Earlham College, UCLA, Arizona State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a Fulbright lecturer in Japan and has received numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships for his work in constitutional and legal history. He has served on several Pulitzer Prize selection juries for history and biography. He serves also on the editorial boards of the Ulysses S. Grant Association and the Jefferson Davis Association. Hyman has written numerous books and articles including Era of the Oath: Northern Loyalty Tests During the Civil War and Reconstruction (1954); A More Perfect Union: The Impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on the Constitution (1973); and Lincoln's Reconstruction: Neither Failure of Vision nor Vision of Failure (1980).

William E. Gienapp, professor of history at Harvard University, received his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a specialist in the sectional conflict and nineteenth-century American politics. His book, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (1987), won the Avery O. Craven Award. He has written numerous articles, sections in college history textbooks, and selected essays. Gienapp is finishing a book on Abraham Lincoln and Civil War America.

Thomas F. Schwartz is curator of the Henry Horner Lincoln Collection at the Illinois State Historical Library and editor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. His numerous articles and book reviews have appeared in Civil War History, Illinois Historical Journal, and the Journal of American History. He is working on a joint Lincoln exhibition with the Huntington Library in San Marino, California.

Frank J. Williams is president of the Abraham Lincoln Association, as well as past president of the Lincoln Group of Boston. He lectures widely, most recently at the International Lincoln Conference, Taipei, Taiwan. As principal advisor for the Lincoln and the American Political Tradition symposium at Brown University, he won a special Bardoness Award. He contributed a chapter on the Abraham Lincoln Association to Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer's Lincoln On Democracy (1990). He continues to write a two-volume Lincoln bibliography and expand his private Lincoln book and manuscript collection.