James A. Henretta  is Professor Emeritus of American History at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he taught Early American History and Legal History. His publications include “Salutary Neglect”: Colonial Administration under the Duke of Newcastle; Evolution and Revolution: American Society, 1600–1820; and The Origins of American Capitalism. His most recent publication is a long article, “Magistrates, Lawyers, Legislators: The Three Legal Systems of Early America,” in The Cambridge History of American Law.

Rebecca Edwards is Eloise Ellery Professor of History at Vassar College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century politics, the Civil War, the frontier West, and women, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of, among other publications, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era; New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905; and the essay “Women's and Gender History” in The New American History. She is currently working on a book about the role of childbearing in the expansion of America's nineteenth-century empire.

Robert O. Self is Mary Ann Lippitt Professor of American History at Brown University. His research focuses on urban history, American politics, and the post-1945 United States. He is the author of American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland, which won four professional prizes, including the James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, and co-editor of Intimate States: Gender, Sexuality, and Governance in Modern American History. He is currently at work on a book about the centrality of houses, cars, and children to family consumption in the twentieth-century United States.