RICHARD EDWARDS is Director Emeritus, Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska, and author of fifteen books, most recently (with Jacob Friefeld) The First Migrants: How Black Homesteaders’ Quest for Land and Freedom Heralded America’s Great Migration (2023).

KATHRYN LOFTON is Lex Hixon Professor of Religious Studies and American Studies, professor of history and divinity, at Yale University.

JULIE MUJIC is a historian and assistant professor of global commerce at Denison University. She studies the impact of the Civil War on the midwestern home front.