Born in Mobile, Alabama, Carol Berkin received her undergraduate degree from Barnard College and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her dissertation won the Bancroft Award. She is now presidential professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She has written JONATHAN SEWALL: ODYSSEY OF AN AMERICAN LOYALIST (1974); FIRST GENERATIONS: WOMEN IN COLONIAL AMERICA (l996); A BRILLIANT SOLUTION: INVENTING THE AMERICAN CONSTITUTION (2002); and REVOLUTIONARY MOTHERS: WOMEN IN THE STRUGGLE FOR AMERICA'S INDEPENDENCE (2005). She has edited WOMEN OF AMERICA: A HISTORY (with Mary Beth Norton, 1979); WOMEN, WAR AND REVOLUTION (with Clara M. Lovett, 1980); WOMEN'S VOICES, WOMEN'S LIVES: DOCUMENTS IN EARLY AMERICAN HISTORY (with Leslie Horowitz, 1998); and LOOKING FORWARD/LOOKING BACK: A WOMEN'S STUDIES READER (with Judith Pinch and Carole Appel, 2005).

She was contributing editor on southern women for THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SOUTHERN CULTURE and has appeared in the PBS series "Liberty! The American Revolution; Ben Franklin; and Alexander Hamilton" and The History Channel's "Founding Fathers." Professor Berkin chaired the Dunning Beveridge Prize Committee for the American Historical Association, the Columbia University Seminar in Early American History, and the Taylor Prize Committee of the Southern Association of Women Historians. She served on the program committees for both the Society for the History of the Early American Republic and the Organization of American Historians. She has served on the Planning Committee for the U.S. Department of Education's National Assessment of Educational Progress, and she chaired the CLEP Committee for Educational Testing Service. She serves on the Board of Trustees of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and The National Council for History Education.