CONTRIBUTORS' BIOGRAPHIES

Richard Carlson recently retired from the Illinois State Board of Education after thirty-five years in the education field. He taught high school U. S. history for seventeen years, and he also served as the head consultant at the Education Service Center #11, working with social science curriculum, school improvement initiatives, and cooperative learning training. At the State Board of Education, Carlson worked with the learning standards for social science and the Standards-Aligned Classroom Initiative, and he facilitated the writing of the Social Science Performance Descriptors and the Social Emotional Learning Standards and Performance Descriptors. He received a bachelor's degree in History Education from Western Illinois University and a master's degree in Educational Foundations, also from Western. Today he is a private consultant working on standards projects and as a Standards-Aligned Classroom coach.

James E. Davis taught high school in Michigan before earning the Ph. D. in American history from the University of Michigan in 1971 and joining Illinois College, where he is William and Charlotte Gardner Professor of History and Professor of Geography. He is author of Frontier America, 1800-1840 (1977), Dreams to Dust (1989), and Frontier Illinois (1998), as well as numerous articles, essays, and reviews. He has served as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, publishers, and businesses. He is currently researching activities of ordinary soldiers during the Civil War.

Tamara Douglass holds a B. S. in education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; she is currently working on an M. A. in history from the University of Illinois at Springfield. She teaches at Springfield Southeast High School, Springfield, Illinois.

Greg Hall, the guest editor of this issue, is an associate professor of history at Western Illinois University where he teaches Illinois, the American West, and environmental history. His research expertise is in the labor history of the West, which has led to several publications, most notably Harvest Wobblies; The Industrial Workers of the World and Agricultural Laborers in the American West, 1905-1930 (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 2001).

Virginia Jelatis earned her Ph. D. from the University of Minnesota in 1999. She is associate professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the History Department at Western Illinois University. Her areas of specialization include Colonial American history, the American Revolution, and American Indian history. Her current research focuses on the role of Indian agents and factors in Illinois and Wisconsin Territories, 1804-1832. She has presented papers on this topic at several regional conferences and was guest speaker on two occasions at Old Fort Madison, presenting papers entitled "Irreconcilable Differences: Black Hawk and Old Fort Madison" and "Early Lead Mining on the Upper-Mississippi River Valley."

Mark Newman is an associate professor in Curriculum and Instruction at National College of Education, National-Louis University, specializing in history and social studies. He received a Ph. D. in history from the University of California Los Angeles. He has published several books and articles on history education. His current interest is the use of visual images as historical texts, and he is creating a curriculum sourcebook on the use of pictures to study the history of Chicago from the 1830s to World War I.

Ellen More Nordhauser is retired from the Department of Historical Studies at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville where she served as department chair from 2000 to 2004. She continues to teach Illinois history at the university. Her interests include regional history. She co-authored a history of Edwardsville in 1996 and also wrote a privately published history of the St. Louis National Stockyards in East St. Louis. She received her Ph. D. from Stanford University.

Kevin J. Suess is a descendant of nineteenth-century German pioneers in Clay County, Illinois. He is a graduate of Illinois State University with degrees in both Social Science Education and Speech Pathology and Audiology. He has been teaching for five years and teaches currently at Normal Community High School in Normal, Illinois.

Free Frank's great-great-granddaughter, Juliet E. K. Walker, has worked hard to secure Free Frank's place in history. Her most recent undertaking involves an effort to put his gravesite, in Barry, Illinois, on the map. Her previous research provided the documentation for New Philadelphia to be listed in the National Register of Historic Places. As founder and executive director of the Free Frank New Philadelphia Historic Preservation Foundation in 2004, her foundation unveiled architectural plans and a scale model for the rebuilding of Free Frank's historic town at its height in the 1850s. A historian at the University of Texas at Austin, formerly at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she founded and is the Director of the Center of Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of Texas at Austin. She has won numerous awards and grants for her work.