Michael Perman is Professor of History and Research Professor in the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He received his B.A. from Oxford University and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation adviser was the late John Hope Franklin. He has published three books on the late nineteenth century South: REUNION WITHOUT COMPROMISE: THE SOUTH AND RECONSTRUCTION, 1865-1868 (1973); THE ROAD TO REDEMPTION: SOUTHERN POLITICS, 1869-1879 (1984), which won three book prizes; and STRUGGLE FOR MASTERY: DISFRANCHISEMENT IN THE SOUTH, 1888-1908 (2001). He has also written EMANCIPATION AND RECONSTRUCTION (2003) and, more recently, PURSUIT OF UNITY: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH (2010). Perman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1979-80 and was appointed the John Adams Distinguished Professor of American History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in 2002-2003. In 2007, he gave the 69th Series of the Fleming Lectures in Southern History, soon to be published by Louisiana State University Press.
Amy Murrell Taylor is Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her B.A. from Duke University (1993) and her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia (2001), where she worked with the Virginia Center for Digital History and served as a project manager for the VALLEY OF THE SHADOW: TWO COMMUNITIES IN THE AMERICAN CIVIL WAR, a digital archive. Taylor has written THE DIVIDED FAMILY IN CIVIL WAR AMERICA (2005), a social and cultural study that explores how families coped with the war's intrusion into their private lives. She has also contributed chapters to Joan Cashin, ed., THE WAR WAS YOU AND ME (2002) and Catherine Clinton, ed., SOUTHERN FAMILIES AT WAR (2000). Taylor served as a production and research assistant for the PBS series, THE RISE AND FALL OF JIM CROW. The American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities have supported her research. She is now studying the social history of emancipation, focusing on slave runaways and refugee camps. In 2007, she won an excellence-in-teaching award at her university.
