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Michael O’Brien was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and studied at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he received a Ph.D. in history.  He is the author of the widely praised John F. Kennedy: A Biography, a full-scale study based on eleven years’ research into letters, diaries, financial papers, medical records, manuscripts, and oral histories; and a concise analytical life of the president, Rethinking Kennedy.  He is now emeritus professor of history at ...

In addition to Coming Apart, his account of the 1960s, William L. O’Neill has also written more than a dozen books in American history, including A Bubble in Time: America During the Interwar Years, 1989–2001; A Democracy at War; American High: The Years of Confidence, 1945–1960; and Feminism in America. He is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University.

Kenneth O’Reilly was born in New York City, and after studying American history he received a Ph.D. from Marquette University. His other books include Nixon’s Piano: Presidents and Racial Politics from Washington to Clinton, and Racial Matters: The FBI’s Secret File on Black America, a New York Times notable book of the year. Mr. O’Reilly has received honors and awards from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights, the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the John F. Kennedy ...

Michael Oriard played football for the University of Notre Dame and the Kansas City Chiefs and is now retired from Oregon State University, where he was distinguished professor of American Literature and Culture and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts. He is the author of seven books, including a football memoir, The End of Autumn, and four volumes on the cultural history of American football, and has written on football for the New York Times, the Washington Post, ...

Francis Parkman (1823–1893) was born in Boston to a distinguished Brahmin family. In an attempt to remedy his poor health as a boy, he was sent to live with his maternal grandmother on three thousand acres of wilderness near Medford, Massachusetts, and there he developed a love of forests and some of the characteristic capabilities of the frontiersman. After graduating from Harvard College in 1845 he was persuaded to attend law school, but it did not sway him from his ...

Thomas R. Pegram is professor of History at Loyola University Maryland.  His most recent book is One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.  He has also written Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933, a highly regarded study of the forces that won prohibition.  Born in Hammond, Indiana, Mr. Pegram grew up in the Midwest and in California, then studied at Santa Clara University and Brandeis, where he ...

Antero Pietila worked for the Baltimore Sun from 1969 to 2004 and served as the paper’s bureau chief in South Africa and Moscow. He is the author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (2010), a history of segregation patterns in Baltimore. Stacy Spaulding is associate professor of journalism and new media at Towson University.

David M. Potter (1910–1971), born in Augusta, Georgia, was professor of history at Yale and Stanford universities. At the time of his death he was president of both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He was posthumously awarded the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for The Impending Crisis, from which this piece is drawn. Among his other books are Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis, People of Plenty, and The South and the Sectional Conflict. Don ...