American Destiny

Mark C. Carnes

Mark C. Carnes received his undergraduate degree from Harvard and his Ph.D in history from Columbia University. He has chaired both the history and American studies departments at Barnard College and Columbia University, where he serves as the Ann Whitney Olin professor of history. He is also the general editor of the American National Biography, whose 27th volume will appear in 2011. Carnes has published numerous books on American social and cultural history, including Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (1989), Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies (1995), Novel History: Historians and Novelists Confront America's Past (2001) and Invisible Giants: 50 Americans That Shaped the Nation but Missed the History Books (2002). Carnes also pioneered the Reacting to the Past pedagogy, which won the Theodore Hesburgh Award as the top outstanding pedagogical innovation in the nation (2004). In Reacting to the Past, college students play elaborate games, set in the past, their roles informed by classic texts. (For more on Reacting, see: www.barnard.edu/reacting.) In 2005 the American Historical Association named Carnes the recipient of the William Gilbert Prize for the best article on teaching history. His Mind Games: Rethinking Higher Education will be published in 2012.



John A. Garraty

John A. Garraty held a Ph.D from Columbia University and an L.H.D. from Michigan State University. He was the Gouverneur Morris professor emeritus of history at Columbia. He was also the author, co-author and editor of scores of books and articles, among them biographies of Silas Wright, Henry Cabot Lodge, Woodrow Wilson, George W. Perkins and Theodore Roosevelt. With Carnes, he co-edited the American National Biography. Garraty also contributed a volume - The New Commonwealth - to the New American Nation series and published a pioneering comparative study of the Great Depression.