Samantha Barbas, a professor of law at the University of Iowa, discusses her book Actual Malice: Civil Rights and Freedom of the Press in New York Times v. Sullivan. The book explores the landmark 1964 Supreme Court case, which arose...

Samantha Barbas's favorite teacher wasn’t someone from her early schooling, but a colleague she met while beginning her career as a professor at Chapman University: historian Robert “Bob” Slayton. Bob profoundly influenced her approach...

Dava Sobel, known for her work on astronomy, decided to explore the life of Marie Curie—despite Curie not being an astronomer. To do so, Sobel had to learn chemistry, which she found challenging. She turned to three influential high...

Dava Sobel, a longtime science writer, came to the subject of women in science relatively late in her career. While researching her book The Glass Universe, about women astronomers at Harvard, she was struck by how much she had...

David Greenberg, a historian and professor at Rutgers University, recently authored John Lewis: Life, the first comprehensive biography of civil rights icon and longtime Georgia congressman John Lewis. Greenberg chose to write this book...

Khatchig Mouradian is a lecturer at Columbia University specializing in the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and the legacies of genocide. A descendant of Armenian genocide survivors and a child of the Lebanese Civil War, his work is...

H.W. Brands shares that the teacher who had the most influence on his career was his ninth-grade history teacher, Joe DeJardin. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, DeJardin's radical experiment deeply shaped his path. He split the...

Agustina Paglayan is a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in the intersection of politics and education policy. She is the author of Raised to Obey: The Rise and Spread of Mass Education...

Richard Evans, a Welsh-born historian and Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge University, developed an early interest in German history after witnessing post-WWII bomb damage in London. His academic journey led him to study the...

Joanna Sliwa's journey into Holocaust studies began in the early 2000s as an undergraduate student at Kean University, where she took the only Holocaust course available, focusing on literature and film. Drawn to the experiences of...

Thomas Weber, a professor of history and international affairs at the University of Aberdeen and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, is the author of Becoming Hitler: The Making of a Nazi. His research challenges the...

Annette Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, is a historian and author of On Juneteenth, a blend of memoir and history. In the book, she explores her family's deep roots in Texas, dating back to the 1820s and...

Debórah Dwork is the director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and an author. Her latest book, Saints and Liars, explores the stories of Americans who...

Deborah Riley Draper is a writer, director, filmmaker, producer, and author of Olympic Pride, American Prejudice. Her documentary and book explore the untold story of 18 African-American athletes who competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics,...

Bob Dilenschneider's book explores the concept of character—an essential quality built on courage, integrity, and leadership. Through profiles of influential figures such as Mother Teresa, Jimmy Stewart, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Father...

Tommie Shelby, a professor at Harvard University, explores the idea of prison abolition, a concept often dismissed as unrealistic. He explains that abolitionists argue prisons are both ineffective and immoral, and that mass incarceration...

Mary Anne Franks reflects on having had many great teachers, but one mentor, Professor Catharine MacKinnon, had a profound impact on her career path. Although Franks initially disliked law school and planned to return to teaching...

Bradley Hart reflects on the many teachers he's had, both in and out of the classroom, but names his doctoral supervisor, Richard J. Evans, as the most influential. He praises Evans for his encyclopedic knowledge of historiography and...

Bradley W. Hart is a World War II historian at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. A former professor at CSU Fresno, he earned his PhD from Cambridge and studied the international eugenics movement and its influence on Nazi Germany....

One of the most formative professional experiences for David Greenberg was working with legendary journalist Bob Woodward just a year out of college. Although Greenberg didn’t see himself as a natural newspaper reporter like Woodward, he...

Khatchig Mouradian grew up during the Lebanese Civil War, often taking refuge in bomb shelters and facing frequent school disruptions. During this turbulent time, the school library became his intellectual sanctuary, and the...

H.W. Brands shares that the teacher who had the most influence on his career was his ninth-grade history teacher, Joe DeJardin. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, DeJardin's radical experiment deeply shaped his path. He split the...

Clay Risen, a reporter at The New York Times, explores the era from 1946 to 1957 in his book Red Scare, detailing how anti-communist hysteria shaped American society. During this time, fear of communism infiltrated every level of...

New York Times reporter Clay Risen reflects on his journalism career, crediting much of his growth to two influential mentors—a husband and wife team. Haywood Moxley, his high school English teacher, taught him to think critically about...