David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University, the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale, and the author of several books, most recently, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.

Jim Downs is an associate professor of history at Connecticut College and the author of Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.