After Ins escape from Charleston, William Merrick Bristol! resumed his teaching career, first in Illinois, then in Milwaukee. In 1863 he enlisted in the ijth Battery, Wisconsin Light Artillery, rising to the rank of first lieutenant by the end of the war. Most of his time in the Army was spent as an ordnance officer in New Orleans. Following the Civil War he attended Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts and then took on a succession of teaching jobs; he was a professor of Latin at Ripon College in Wisconsin, Atlanta University in Georgia, and Yankton College in South Dakota. He retired from teaching in 1886 to work as an accountant in a real-estate and brokerage firm in Minneapolis. Mrs. Hauenstein, who knew him there when she was a child, recalls that he had blue eyes and a clipped beard and looked distinguished—"like Santa Claus, only neater.” Bristoll, she remembers, began each day with a reading from the Bible, then played a hymn on the organ. Before leaving for work he would recite the Lord’s Prayer with his wife. Bristoll died in Minneapolis at the age of seventy in 1910.
Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.
Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.
Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.
Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures.
Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.
David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.
