Zoe Trodd is on the Tutorial Board in the History and Literature department at Harvard University, where she researches American protest literature. Her other books include American Protest Literature (2006), To Plead Our Own Cause: Personal Stories by Today’s Slaves (2008), and The Long Civil Rights Movement (2008). She has also published numerous articles on American literature, history and visual culture.

John Stauffer is the author of The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race, which won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the Avery Craven Book Prize, and was the Lincoln Prize runner-up. He is the editor of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom; and is at work on a new book, By the Love of Comrades: Interracial Frienships, Democratic Dream, and the Meaning of Americ. He is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Hummanities at Harvard University, where he teaches courses on American literature and culture.