Jon Gjerde died in October 2008. He was Alexander F. and May T. Morrison professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1982. His areas of expertise included nineteenth-century America with particular reference to immigration and religion, and he published some thirty articles on these subjects. He also published FROM PEASANTS TO FARMERS: THE MIGRATION FROM BALESTRAND, NORWAY, TO THE UPPER MIDDLE WEST (1985) and THE MINDS OF THE WEST: THE ETHNOCULTURAL EVOLUTION OF THE RURAL MIDDLE WEST, 1830-1917 (1997), both of which won the Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award of the Immigration History Society for the best book… in agricultural history.Edward J. Blum, associate professor of history at San Diego State University, earned his B.A. in history from the University of Michigan and his Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky. His first book, REFORGING THE WHITE REPUBLIC: RACE, RELIGION, AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM, 1865-1898 (2005), won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship, the C. Vann Woodward Dissertation Prize from the Southern Historical Association, and the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities from the Council of Graduate Schools. His second book, W. E. B. DU BOIS, AMERICAN PROPHET (2007), was a finalist for the Grawemeyer Award in Religion. Both of these works received honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights. In 2007, History News Network named Blum a "Top Young Historian." He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute for Constitutional Studies at George Washington University. Blum is currently writing a history of conceptions of evil during the Civil War era.