LEWIS GANNETT, a freelance writer based in Boston, graduated from Harvard College and pursued postgraduate studies in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He assisted the late Dr. C. A. Tripp with the preparation of The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, to be published by Free Press in 2005.

WARD M. MCAFEE is professor emeritus of history at California State University, San Bernardino. He completed and edited Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2001). Professor McAfee's latest work is a biography of Abraham Lincoln, Citizen Lincoln (Nova Science Publishers, 2004).

JAMES A. RAWLEY is professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska. In his distinguished career he has published many important books and articles regarding Lincoln-era American society and politics. The University of Nebraska Press recently published a second edition of his Lincoln biography, Abraham Lincoln and a Nation Worth Fighting For (2003).

BARRY SCHWARTZ is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Georgia. His research analyzing "collective memory" and how the work of historians and commemorative agents corresponds to the historical consciousness of the general public is reflected in his important book Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of National Memory (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

THOMAS F. SCHWARTZ is Illinois State Historian and Director of Research and Collections at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield.

DAVID ZAREFSKY is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Argumentation and Debate and professor of communication studies at Northwestern University. He is the author or editor of eight books, including Lincoln, Douglas, and Slavery: In the Crucible of Public Debate (University of Chicago Press, 1990), for which he won the National Communication Association's Winans-Wichelns Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Rhetoric and Public Address.