Bernard Bailyn was a preeminent historian of early America and the Atlantic world. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and Voyagers to the West, and received the National Book Award for The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson . At Harvard University, he served as Adams University Professor and James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History. Patricia L. Denault is Web Editor for the The Business History Conference. She is former Administrative Director of Harvard University's International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, 1500-1825, and its Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. Linda M. Heywood is Professor of History and African American Studies at Boston University.

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is Alice Drysdale Sheffield Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of How to Write the History of the New World, Puritan Conquistadors, and Nature, Empire, and Nation. Londa Schiebinger is John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director of the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University. Emma Rothschild is a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and Director of the Center for History and Economics, King's College.