Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research at Harvard University. He is the author of 16 books, including
Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008 and
Tradition and the Black Atlantic, and has made 12 documentaries, including Finding Your Roots, Black in Latin America, and Looking for Lincoln. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root, a daily online magazine. He is the recipient of 51 honorary degrees and numerous awards. In 1981, he was a member of the first class awarded genius grants by the MacArthur Foundation, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time's 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony's Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony's Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012.
The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of Professor Gates's essays, was published in 2012.
Donald Yacovone, the research manager at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, earned his
Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate School and has taught at Pitzer College, the University of Arizona, and Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He was an editor at the Black Abolitionist Papers project before becoming the senior associate editor at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he founded and edited The Massachusetts Historical Review and organized many public history programs in the Boston area. An expert in Victorian manhood, the antislavery movement, and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, he has published six books, including
Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion;
A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens; and most recently,
Lincoln on Race and Slavery, with
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
