Franklin Rosemont: Franklin Rosemont (1943-2009)was a celebrated poet, artist, historian, street speaker, and co-founder of the Chicago Surrealist Group. Called the "most productive scholar of labor and the left in the United States," he authored or edited over 25 volumes of writings by the forgotten figures of the American counter-cultural left. With Penelope Rosemont, he sustained the Charles H. Kerr publishing company for three decades, and edited the Surrealist Histories series at the University of Texas Press. His Surrealism: Black, Brown & Beige collection, co-edited with Robin DG Kelley, won the American Book Award in 2010.
David Roediger: David Roediger teaches history and African American Studies at University of Illinois. He was born in southern Illinois and educated in public schools in that state, with a B.S. in Ed from Northern Illinois University. He completed a doctorate in History at Northwestern in 1979. Roediger has taught labor and Southern history at Northwestern, University of Missouri and University of Minnesota. He has also worked as an editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers at Yale University. He has written on U.S. movements for a shorter working day, on labor and poetry, on the history of radicalism, and on the racial identities of white workers and of immigrants. His books include Our Own Time, The Wages of Whiteness, How Race Survived U.S. History, and Towards the Abolition of Whiteness, all from Verso, Colored White (California), and Working Towards Whiteness (Basic). His edited books include an edition of Covington Hall’s Labor Struggles in the Deep South (Kerr), and another of W.E.B. Du Bois’s John Brown (Random House/Modern Library) as well as Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (Schocken). The former chair of the editorial committee of the Charles H. Kerr Company, the world’s oldest radical publisher, he has been active in the surrealist movement, labor support and anti-racist organizing.
Peter Linebaugh: Peter Linebaugh, Professor, a student of E.P. Thompson, received his Ph.D. in British history from the University of Warwick in 1975. A graduate of Swarthmore and of Columbia, he taught at Rochester, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Harvard and Tufts before joining The University of Toledo in 1994. Grants from the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen and from the Fulbright and Mellon fellowship programs have supported his research.
He is the author of the acclaimed social history of crime and the death penalty in 18th-century England, The London Hanged (1991), co-editor, with Doug Hay and E.P. Thompson, of Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (1975), and co-author with Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Beacon Press Boston, 2000; Verso: London, 2000, paperback 2001) with Italian, Spanish, and German translations already published, and French and Korean translations in progress. His most recent book, The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All was published by the University of California Press in 2008.
David Roediger teaches in American Studies, History, and African and African American Studies at the University of Kansas. His recent books include How Race Survived United States History and Class, Race, and Marxism.
