Conference Participants
Richard Newman
Richard S. Newman is a professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His book The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (UNC Press, 2002) is a highly acclaimed and influential analysis of abolitionist tactics and strategies, with emphasis on the grassroots activism of immediatists. He is also co-editor of Pamphlets of Protests: An Anthology of Early American Protest Literature, 1790-1860.
Dan Biddle and Murray Dubin
Biddle and Dubin are collaborating on a biography of civil rights activist Octavius Catto. Entitled There Must Come a Change: Octavius Catto and the Battle for Civil Rights in the North in the 1860s, the book will be published by Temple University Press in 2008. Biddle is on a leave of absence from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where he has been editor of investigative projects; he won a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in 1997. Dubin has recently retired from the Inquirer after 34 years as a reporter and editor at the paper. He is author of the 1996 Temple University Press book South Philadelphia: Mummers, Memories and the Melrose Diner.
Fergus Bordewich
Bordewich is an acclaimed author whose books have won praise from The Wall Street Journal, New Yorker, Washington Post and many other prestigious media sources. His recent Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (HarperCollins/Amistad, 2005) has set a new standard for the field and has already been hailed as the definitive history of the UGRR.
Craig Caba
Caba is a member of the Executive Boards of the Gettysburg Battlefield Preservation Association, Camp Curtin Historical Society, and Harrisburg Civil War Roundtable. He has authored nine books on military and historical topics, including Lost Children of the Battlefield: A Collection of Photographs Found at Gettysburg and Episodes of Gettysburg and the Underground Railroad. An expert on Civil War artifacts, preservation and material culture, Caba has lectured before Civil War Roundtables and historical meetings around the country and served as a film consultant for A&E, the History Channel, and PBS. He was awarded a Pa. House of Representatives Citation for his fundraising efforts for the Gettysburg Monuments Preservation Project.
Chris Densmore
Densmore is Curator of Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College. He is author of Red Jacket: Iroquois Orator and Diplomat (Syracuse, 1999), co-author of Quaker Crosscurrents (Syracuse, 1995), and has written numerous articles on Quaker history, antislavery, and Native American history, including, most recently, articles on the Progressive Friends of Longwood in Quaker History; the legal work of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society in Pennsylvania Legacies; and a chapter on Quakers and abolition in Philadelphia for a forthcoming book on abolition in Philadelphia. He serves on the boards of the Friends Historical Association and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
Judith Ann Giesberg
Giesberg is Assistant Professor of History at Villanova University, and author of Civil War Sisterhood: The United States Sanitary Commission and Women’s Politics in Transition (Northeastern University Press, 2000). Giesberg’s new book is a study of how women created a variety of unorthodox sites of political engagement during the U.S. Civil War. She is on the advisory committee of the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia.
James McGowan
McGowan is an authority on the Underground Railroad. His classic study Station Master on the Underground Railroad: The Life and Letters of Thomas Garrett (1977), based on prodigious research in Philadelphia archives, has just been published in a revised and expanded edition by McFarland Press. McGowan is editor of the Harriet Tubman Journal. He received a B.A. (1979) and a master’s degree in Counseling Psychology (1989) from Temple University and was Senior Recipient of the Sol Feinstone Award, Temple’s highest non-academic award, for community service, in 1979. He worked as Assistant Director of Disabled Students Services at Temple from 1987 to 1989.
David Orr
Orr is Research Professor of Anthropology at Temple University where he teaches courses on battlefield archaeology and the archaeology of Philadelphia. He is also the Chief Archaeologist at Valley Forge National Historical Park. With Temple colleague Anthony Ranere, he received a major grant from the William Penn Foundation to produce a documentary on the excavation of the James Dexter House in Philadelphia; Dexter was a leading figure in the Free African Society during the 18th century. Orr is currently researching the 8th United States Colored Troops, Camp William Penn, and the African Union Cemetery located near his hometown of Delaware City, Delaware.
James M. Paradis
Paradis is a former licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg National Military Park, and author of African Americans and the Gettysburg Campaign (2005). He received his Ph.D. in history From Temple, where he studied under Russell Weigley; his dissertation was the basis for his first book, Strike the Blow for Freedom: The 6th United States Colored Infantry in the Civil War (1998). Paradis is currently dean of the Upper Hall at St. Mary’s Hall-Doane Academy in Burlington, New Jersey, a frequent lecturer and participant in Civil War roundtables, and a board member of the “Committee for the Restoration of Historic Lamott,” caretakers of the site of Camp William Penn.
Millicent Sparks
Sparks is Education and Community Outreach Coordinator of the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum of Philadelphia. She is a veteran performing artist and has portrayed Harriet Tubman at a wide range of Underground Railroad and Civil War events. |
