John Channing Briggs is a Professor of English at UC Riverside and Director of the University Writing Program. He is the author of Francis Bacon and the Rhetoric of Nature (Harvard, 1989), which won the Thomas J. Wilson Award, and Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Johns Hopkins, 2005). Other writings on Lincoln have appeared in the Claremont Review of Books and the Lucas Morel collection, Lincoln and Liberty. His work include essays on Shakespeare and tyranny, literary catharsis, religion and science in Bacon’s new learning, and the history of rhetoric. He is the winner of the UC Riverside Faculty Teaching Award.

Carole Emberton is Associate Professor of History at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Beyond Redemption: Race, Violence, and the American South after the Civil War (Chicago, 2013) and is currently at work on a book about the Federal Writers’ Project and ex-slaves’ memories of the Civil War and emancipation.

John Hoffmann was the Curator of the Illinois History and Lincoln Collections of the University of Illinois Library at Urbana. His publications include a number of pieces on Lincoln, the Civil War, and Illinois history as well as biographical sketches of Benjamin P. Thomas and Robert W. Johannsen.

Matthew Norman is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati Blue Ash College. He has published essays and reviews on Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, and Illinois history. He is an editor of Ohio Valley History and completing an anthology of African American writings on Lincoln that is under contract with the University of Illinois Press.

Jeremy Prichard received his Ph.D. in 2014 from the University of Kansas, where he specialized in mid-nineteenth century U.S. history and was a contributor to the Kansas City Public Library’s award-winning website “Civil War on the Western Border: The Missouri-Kansas Conflict 1854–1865.” His article is adapted from his dissertation, “In Lincoln’s Shadow: The Civil War in Springfield, Illinois.”

Glenna R. Schroeder-Lein retired in 2015 as Manuscripts Librarian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library. Previous to that she was an assistant editor for The Papers of Andrew Johnson. She is the author of nineteen articles and review essays, more than fifty book reviews, and four books, most recently Lincoln and Medicine.