Barbara J. Fields is Professor of History at Columbia University. Her books include the prize-winning Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground: Maryland During the Nineteenth Century; The Destruction of Slavery (coauthored with the Freedmen and Southern Society Project); and Free at Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom, and the Civil War.

Karen E. Fields is Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Center for African and African American Research at Duke University. Her books include a translation of Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life. She is at work on Racism in the Academy: A Traveler's Guide and Bordeaux's Africa.