Edward J. Blum is assistant professor of history at San Diego State University. He is the winner of the 2004 C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize for the best dissertation in southern history, the author of the Bancroft Prize-nominated book, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (2005), and the editor of Vale of Tears: New Essays on Religion and Reconstruction (2005). He is completing a religious biography of W. E. B. Du Bois to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Robert Bray is R. Forrest Colwell Professor of American Literature at Illinois Wesleyan University. He has published widely in the field of midwestern and Illinois literature and culture. His most recent book is Peter Cartwright, Legendary Frontier Preacher (2005). He is currently writing a book about Lincoln as a reader.

John Hoffmann is librarian and manuscript curator of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections at the University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign. He is fitfully at work on an annotated edition of Benjamin P. Thomas, Portrait for Posterity: Lincoln and His Biographers (1947).

Graham Alexander Peck is associate professor of history at Saint Xavier University in Chicago. He earned the Ph.D. in American history from Northwestern University and specializes in antebellum American politics. In 2003, the Abraham Lincoln Institute awarded him the Hay-Nicolay Scholars Prize.