Philip J. Deloria is professor of history and director of the Program in American Culture at the University of Michigan. His book, Playing Indian (1998), won an outstanding book award form the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. He coedited (with Neal Salisbury) the Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (2002; paperback 2004) and his most recent book is Indians in Unexpected Places (2004).

Patricia Nelson Limerick, the recipient of a MacArthur Award, was born in the West that she has observed for many years. She serves as chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is a past president of the Western History Association and the American Studies Association. Her books include The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (2000), and Desert Passages: Encounters With the American Deserts (2001); her current research project is entitled The Atomic West.

Jack N. Rakove is Coe Professor of American Studies at Stanford. His book, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (1996), won the Pulitzer Prize. He is also the author of James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (2nd edition, 2001) and Declaring Rights: A Brief Documentary History (1997) and editor of The Federalist: The Essential Essays, by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (2003). His present research agenda is to complete a history of American polity from the late 1770s carrying through to the debates over the Constitution in the 1780s and culminating in the partisan conflicts of the 1790s.

David Burner, a professor of history at SUNY at Stony Brook, received his doctorate at Columbia, where he studied under Richard Hofstadter. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a Ford Fellow at Harvard. His early books are The Politics of Provincialism and Herbert Hoover: A Public Life. He is also the author of Making Peace with the Sixties (1996) and John F. Kennedy and a New Generation (2nd edition, 2003). He is currently writing a history of West Point.