Robert Bray, who earned a doctorate in English from the University of Chicago, is Colwell Professor of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University. He has written widely on midwestern and Illinois literature, including Rediscoveries (1982) and A Reader's Guide to Illinois Literature (1985). While working on a biography of Peter Cartwright, he began his study of Lincoln with "The Lincoln-Cartwright Acquaintance" in 1987. In November 1990, at the Illinois History Symposium in Springfield, he presented the paper that started the Benjamin Thomas-Stephen Oates Lincoln biography plagiarism controversy, "Reading Between the Texts." That essay, along with Oates's response and viewpoints from scholars on both sides of the issue, comprise a special issue of the Journal of Information Ethics (1994). With Michael Burlingame, Bray is completing a book on the controversy.

Michael Burlingame is professor of history at Connecticut College, New London, where he has taught since 1968. A graduate of Princeton University with a doctorate from The Johns Hopkins University, he is the author of The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994). Among his current editing projects are a collection of John Hay's Civil War letters and journalism, a new edition of Hay's diary, a collection of interviews by John Nicolay, an anthology of letters and reminiscences by Lincoln's White House secretaries, and excerpts from the Civil War dispatches of Noah Brooks.

Daniel Walker Howe is Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford University in England. He was educated at Harvard, Oxford, and the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at Yale for seven years, and then for nineteen years at the University of California, Los Angeles. Howe has been awarded research fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard, and most recently by the Huntington Library. Among his works are The Unitarian Conscience (1970; revised edition, 1988), Victorian America (1976), and The Political Culture of the American Whigs (1980). He is writing Virtue, Passion, and Politics, a volume that will deal with the construction of the self in American culture from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln.

Glenn LaFantasie, deputy historian of the U.S. Department of State, is the editor of Gettysburg: Colonel William C. Oates and Lieutenant Frank A. Haskell (1991), a volume in the popular Bantam Eyewitness of the Civil War series. He is working on a book about the encounter between the Twentieth Maine and the Fifteenth Alabama regiments on Little Round Top at Gettysburg.

Drew R. McCoy is the Jacob and Frances Hiatt Professor of History at Clark University. He received an A.B. from Cornell University and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. He has served on the faculties of the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University. He is the author of The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980) and The Last of the Fathers: James Madison and the Republican Legacy (1989). He is currently under contract with the University Press of Kansas to publish a volume on the political thought of Abraham Lincoln. Among his many honors are the Phi Beta Kappa and Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching prizes, the John H. Dunning Prize, the New England Historical Association Book Award, and fellowships from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History and the Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Major L. Wilson, a native of Arkansas and a Navy veteran of World War II, received the B.A. degree from Vanderbilt University and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Kansas. Since 1964 he has been a member of the history faculty of the University of Memphis. A specialist in the period before the Civil War, he is the author of The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (1984) and Space, Time, and Freedom (1974), as well as numerous articles, book reviews, and contributions to scholarly anthologies. He has grown interested in the early career of Abraham Lincoln, participated in two conferences on Lincoln, and published "Lincoln and Van Buren in the Steps of the Fathers: Another Look at the Lyceum Address" (1983).