J. G. Randall Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Johannsen received his PhD from the University of Washington and has taught at the University of Illinois since 1959. The author or editor of eleven books and nearly fifty articles and chapters in books, his publications include Frontier Politics and the Sectional Conflict (1955), Stephen A. Douglas (1973), To The Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (1985), and Lincoln, the South, and Slavery: The Political Dimension (1991). He has delivered the Robert Fortenbaugh Memorial Lectures at Gettysburg College and the Walter Lynwood Fleming Memorial Lectures at Louisiana State University and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Francis Parkman Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History.