Created Equal

Jacqueline Jones teaches American history at the University of Texas at
Austin, where she is Mastin Gentry White Professor of Southern History and Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas. She was born in Christiana, Delaware, a small town of 400 people in the northern part of the state. The local public school was desegregated in 1955, when she was a third grader. That event, combined with the peculiar social etiquette of relations between blacks and whites in the town, sparked her interest in American history. She attended the University of Delaware in nearby Newark and went on to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she received her Ph.D. in history. Her scholarly interests have evolved over time, focusing on labor, women's, African American, and southern history. In 1999 she received a MacArthur Fellowship. One of her biggest challenges has been to balance her responsibilities as teacher, historian, wife, and mother (of two daughters). She is currently working on a book of essays that illustrate, through the biographies of several individuals, the fluidity of racial ideologies in America, from the colonial period to the present. She is the author of several books, including Saving Savannah: The City and the Civil War (2008); Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks (1980); Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and Family Since Slavery (1985), which won the Bancroft Prize and was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses Since the Civil War (1992); and American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1998). In 2001 she completed a memoir that recounts her childhood in Christiana: Creek Walking: Growing Up in Delaware in the 1950s.



Peter H. Wood was born in St. Louis (before the famous arch was built). He recalls seeing Jackie Robinson play against the Cardinals, visiting the courthouse where the Dred Scott case originated, and traveling up the Mississippi to Hannibal, birthplace of Mark Twain. Summer work on the northern Great Lakes aroused his interest in Native American cultures, past and present. He studied at Harvard (B.A., 1964; Ph.D., 1972) and at Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar (1964-1966). His pioneering bookBlack Majority (1974), concerning slavery in colonial South Carolina, won the Beveridge Prize of the American Historical Association. He taught early American history at Duke University from 1975 to 2008. The topics of his articles range from the French explorer LaSalle to Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. He coedited Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, now in its second edition. His demographic essay in that volume provided the first clear picture of population change in the eighteenth-century South. His most recent books are Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2003), Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's "Gulf Stream" (2004), and "Near Andersonville": Winslow Homer's Civil War (2010). Dr. Wood has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, Houston's Rothko Chapel, the Menil Foundation, and the Institute of Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg. He is married to colonial historian Elizabeth Fenn; his varied interests include archaeology, documentary film, and growing gourds. He keeps a baseball bat used by Ted Williams beside his desk.

Thomas ("Tim") Borstelmann, the son of a university psychologist, taught and coached at the elementary and high school levels in Washington state and Colorado before returning to graduate school. From 1991 to 2003, he taught American history at Cornell University while living in Syracuse, New York, before becoming the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He lives with his wife, a health care administrator, and two sons in Lincoln. An avid bicyclist, runner, swimmer, and cross-country skier, he earned his B.A. from Stanford University in 1980 and Ph.D. from Duke University in 1990. He became a historian to figure out the Cold War and American race relations, in part because he had grown up in the South. His first book, concerning American relations with southern Africa in the mid-twentieth century, won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations. His second book, The Cold War and the Color Line, appeared in 2001. His commitment to the classroom earned him a major teaching award at Cornell, the Robert and Helen Appel Fellowship. He found writing Created Equal a natural complement to what he does in the classroom, trying to provide both telling details of the American past and the broad picture of how the United States has developed as it has. A specialist in U.S. foreign relations and modern world history, he is equally fascinated with domestic American politics and social change. He is currently working on a book about the United States and the world in the 1970s. In 2011 Dr. Borstelmann will publish his next book, entitled More Equal, Less Equal: Egalitarianism, Market Values, and the Reshaping of America and the World in the 1970s.