Kim Matthew Bauer is historical research specialist at the Henry Horner Lincoln Collection in the Illinois State Historical Library. He has worked as a research librarian at the Illinois State Library and is the author of a number of documents and articles. He is coeditor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association and is working on an article about Charles Shober, a Chicago lithographer.

Gary L. Bunker is a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University. His publications in history include "'Shoddy,' Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War" in American Jewish History (1994) and "Antebellum Caricature and Women's Sphere" in the Journal of Women's History (1992).

Glen W. Davidson is the Doane Professor and vice president for academic affairs at Doane College, Crete and Lincoln, Nebraska, and professor of preventive and societal medicine, University of Nebraska College of Medicine. He is the founding director of the Pearson Museum at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield and founding editor of Caduceus: A Museum Journal for the Health Sciences. He is also past president of the Medical Museums Association.

James Gilreath is the American history specialist for the Rare Book and Special Collections Division in the Library of Congress. He is responsible for the acquisition of rare Americana for the library's collections through purchase and gift and for the interpretation of the library's Americana collections to both general and scholarly audiences. He has written more than seventy books and articles on subjects as diverse as forgery, Thomas Jefferson, Native Americans, Mark Twain, and the history of books in the United States. His book The Judgement of Experts is the result of his involvement in the Mark Hoffman case in Utah, an experience that led him to take courses in forensics from the FBI and the Secret Service.

Mark E. Neely, Jr. is the first John Francis Bannon Professor of history and American studies at Saint Louis University and is the author and coauthor of numerous books and articles. The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1992. His most recent publication is The Last Best Hope of Earth: Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America (1993). He is at work on a book about two-party politics during the Civil War and is coauthor of a study of popular lithographs and engravings of the North during the war.

Thomas F. Schwartz is the Illinois State Historian and former curator of the Henry Horner Lincoln Collection at the Illinois State Historical Library. His collaboration with Louise Taper and John Rhodehamel produced the exhibition "'The Last Best Hope of Earth': Abraham Lincoln and the Promise of America," which ran from October 1993 through November 1994 at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. He is at work on articles dealing with African Americans in antebellum Illinois and on domestic violence in Illinois during the Civil War.