William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. After graduation from Fisk University, he earned his Ph.D. from Harvard, studied in Berlin, and became pioneering historian and sociologist and the founding editor of The Crisis, the official magazine of the NAACP. His major works include The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, and The Supression of the African Slave-Trade. He died in Ghana in 1963 at the age of ninety-five.Eric Foner is the author of many award-winning books on the Civil War and Reconstruction, including The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He is DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University.Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard. He is the author of numerous books, including Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow, and has produced, written, and hosted an array of documentary films for public television, including Finding Your Roots and The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.