John Ashworth was educated at the Universities of Lancaster and Oxford. He is the author of The Republic in Crisis and Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (2 vols) as well as numerous articles on antebellum politics. He is currently Professor of American History at the University of Nottingham.

Michael Burlingame holds the Chancellor Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of numerous books on Abraham Lincoln, including Lincoln and the Civil War (2011), the two-volume biography Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), and The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994). He has also edited several volumes of Lincoln primary source material, most recently Abraham Lincoln: The Observations of John G. Nicolay and John Hay (2007).

Richard Carwardine is President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford University. His analytical biography of Abraham Lincoln won the Lincoln Prize in 2004 and was subsequently published as Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power (Knopf, 2006). He co-edited, with Jay Sexton, The Global Lincoln (Oxford University Press, 2011) and is currently working on a study of Lincoln’s sense of humor.

Brian Dirck is Professor of History at Anderson University in Anderson, Indiana. His first book was Lincoln and Davis: Imagining America, 1808–1865, published in 2001. He has since focused his attention primarily on the life and career of Abraham Lincoln. His 2007 book, Lincoln the Lawyer, won the 2007 Barondess Award from the New York Civil War Roundtable for the best book published on Lincoln that year.

Martin P. Johnson, Assistant Professor of History at Miami University Hamilton, received a Ph.D. in History from Brown University in 1993. He has published two books on nineteenth-century French history, but his main research interest for the past decade has focused on the American Civil War. His most recent book, Writing the Gettysburg Address (University Press of Kansas, 2013) was a co-winner of the 2014 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The book resolves longstanding mysteries about how Lincoln wrote his most admired speech and proposes a new interpretation of its place in Lincoln’s political development.

Kate Clifford Larson is an historian, consultant, and author, specializing in 19th and 20th century U.S. Women’s and African American History. She is the author of The Assassin’s Accomplice: Mary Surratt and the Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln (Basic Books, 2008), Bound For the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero (Ballantine/One World, 2004), and she is currently at work on Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter, a biography of the disabled sister of President John F. Kennedy, due out summer 2015 from Houghton Mifflin.

George C. Rable is the Charles G. Summersell Chair in Southern History at the University of Alabama. His books include Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism (1989), The Confederate Republic: A Revolution Against Politics (1994); Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! (2002) and God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010).

Thomas F. Schwartz began his interest in Lincoln as a graduate student working for the Lincoln Room at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 1985 he was hired as Lincoln Curator for the Illinois State Historical Library. He was later appointed as Illinois State Historian and Director of Collections and Research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. He currently serves as Director of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library-Museum.

Douglas L. Wilson is George A. Lawrence Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Knox College, where he taught English and American Studies and is now Co-director, with Rodney O. Davis, of the Lincoln Studies Center. He is co-editor, with Davis, of Herndon’s Informants (1998) as well as new editions of Herndon’s Lincoln (2007) and The Lincoln-Douglas Debates (2008). His own writings on Lincoln include Honor’s Voice: The Transformation of Abraham Lincoln (1998) and Lincoln’s Sword: The Presidency and the Power of Words (2006), both of which were awarded the Lincoln Prize.