Randy Finley is an associate professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History. He is the author of From Slavery to Uncertain Freedom: The Freedmen's Bureau in Arkansas, 1865—1869, which won a commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. Thomas A. DeBlack is an associate projessor of history at Arkansas Tech University and the author of Arkansas in the Civil War and Reconstruction in the Histories of Arkansas series. James C. Cobb is the B. Phinizy Spalding Distinguished Professor of the History of the American South at the University of Georgia. He is the author of many books, including Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South and The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. He was president of the Southern Historical Association in 1999. Willard B. Gatewood's published works span political, intellectual, social, cultural, economic, military, ethnic, and even environmental history. His focus on the impact of the elite in history began with his first published monograph about a North Carolina educator, Eugene Clyde Brooks, and culminated in Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880—1920, first published by Indiana University Press in 1991 and reprinted by the University of Arkansas Press in 2000.