National Park Service Rally on the High Ground The National Park Service Symposium on the Civil War

Ira Berlin—Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland--College Park. Among his books are Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in Mainland North America and Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South. He also directed the Freedom and Southern Society Project, including the publication of the multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation series.

David W. Blight—Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies, Amherst College. Among his books are Frederick Douglass Civil War: Keeping the Faith in Jubilee and When This Cruel War is Over: TheCivil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster, which he edited. He is also the author of the upcoming Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 1863-1915.

Drew Gilpin Faust—Dean Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and Professor of History, Harvard University. Among her books are Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War; The Creation of Confederate Nationalism: Ideology and Identity in the Civil War South; and James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery.

Eric Foner—Dewitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University. Among his books are The Story of American Freedom; Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution: 1863-1877; Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War; and Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War.

James Oliver Horton—Benjamin Banneker Professor of History, The George Washington University. Among his books are Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community and The History of the African American People. He co-authored with his wife, Lois E. Horton, Community Among Free Blacks, 1700-1860.

Jesse Jackson, Jr.—Member, United States House of Representatives, 2nd District, Illinois. He is the author of the upcoming book A More Perfect Union. Along with Jesse Jackson, Sr., he co-authored It's About the Money: The Fourth Movement of the Freedom Symphony.

Edward T. Linenthal—Edward M. Penson Professor of Religion and American Culture, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh. Among his books are Symbolic Defense: The Cultural Significance of the Strategic Defense Initiative; Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields; and Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum.

James M. McPherson-George—Henry Davis '86 Professor of American History, Princeton University. Among his books are Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era; Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution; Drawn By the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War and For Cause and Comrade: Why Men Fought in the Civil War.

Robert K. Sutton—Superintendent, Manassas National Battlefield Park. Among his books are Americans Interpret the Parthenon: The Progression of Greek Revival Architecture from the East Coast to Oregon, 1800-1860 and Majestic in His Wrath: A Pictorial Life of Frederick Douglass, for which he wrote the introduction.