About the Contributors

Bruce E. Baker is a doctoral student in history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His essay "North Carolina Lynching Ballads" appeared in Under Sentence Of Death: Lynching In The South, a collection edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage, and he currently is studying the historical memory of Reconstruction in the South during the twentieth century.

Philip Beidler is professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he has taught American literature since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. His recent books include The Good War's Greatest Hits: World War II and American Remembering, and First Books: The Printed Word and Cultural Formation in Early Alabama.

Julian Bond is Chairman of the Board of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, and he served for more than twenty years in the Georgia General Assembly.

Lynn A. Casmier-Paz is assistant professor of English at the University of Central Florida. She writes on race, literacy, slave narratives, and autobiography studies, and has just completed an article titled "Slave Narratives and the Rhetoric of Author Portraiture," which will appear in New Literary History.

Charlie Curtis has worked in photography and estate gardening, and lives in Free Union, Virginia, with his wife, Jackie, and his daughter, Emily. In addition to publishing his photographs in magazines, he currently is working to bring his pictures together in book form.

John Shelton Reed, who recently retired from university life, was the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology and the director of the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Among his recent books is 1001 Things Everyone Should Know About the South, written with his wife, Dale Volberg Reed. He is coeditor of Southern Cultures.

Anne Firor Scott is W. K. Boyd Professor of History Emerita at Duke University and a pioneer in the study of southern women's history. Her book The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830-1930 has been constantly in print since its publication in 1970.

James Seay is professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author of four books of poetry.

Harry L. Watson is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and director of unc's Center for the Study of the American South. His publications include Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America, published by Hill & Wang. He also is coeditor of Southern Cultures.