Richard Nelson Current, a native of Colorado, received his degrees from Oberlin, Tufts, and the University of Wisconsin. He has been a member of history departments at the Universities of Illinois, Wisconsin-Madison, and North Carolina-Greensboro, and has lectured extensively throughout the world, including stints as a Fulbright professor at the University of Munich and at the University of Chile and as Harmsworth professor at Oxford University. He is the author or co-author of twenty books, including Old Thad Stevens: A Story of Ambition; Those Terrible Carpetbaggers; Lincoln’s Loyalists: Union Soldiers from the Confederacy; The Lincoln Nobody Knows, and Lincoln the President (co-authored with J.G. Randall), which won the Bancroft Prize in 1956.