Contributors

Phyllis Gernhardt serves as the Chairperson of the Department of History at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Dr. Gernhardt has taught upper-division American history course as well as various survey-level history courses.  Her research interests include: Women's history, Native American history, and Indiana history with a focus on the frontier era.   

Kevin F. Kern is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Akron and Managing Editor of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History.   He specializes in the fields of Ohio history and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history.  Dr. Kern is currently working on a study of the American physical anthropological community's connection to the early twentieth century eugenics movement. 

Martha I. Pallante is a Professor of History and Department Chair at Youngstown State University.  Her current research is "Children and their Books: Children's Religious and Moral Literature in Early New England, 1700-1850.  She has contributed to the History of Education Quarterly, American Studies: A Transnational Reader, and two volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography.  Dr. Pallante is also the Editor of the Ohio Academy of History Newsletter and was awarded the Ohio Academy of History Public History Award for 1999.  She has taught courses in Turning Points in American History, the Atlantic World, Colonial America, and Material Culture.     

Robert C. Reszler is currently a graduate student at the University of Akron College of Business in Akron, Ohio.  After acquiring a Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration from Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, Mr. Reszler spent twenty years in the business world.  He now aspires to be a social studies teacher, historian, and author. 

Lisa Smith is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Akron.  She is currently working on her dissertation dealing with the ways that Ohio women constructed wartime identities for them selves during the American Civil War. 

Shirley Teresa Wajda is a tenured assistant professor of history at Kent State University.  Her research interests include American material culture studies, American women's history, and consumerism.  She has recently published "`A Kind of Missionary Work':  The Labor and Legacy of Cincinnati's Society Women, 1877-1922," in Cynthia Amnéus, A Separate Sphere:  Dressmakers in Cincinnati's Golden Age, 1877-1922, with a foreword by Timothy Rub (Lubbock:  Texas Tech University Press for the Cincinnati Art Museum, 2003).  She also has recently been named new editor for Ohio History. 

Greg Wilson is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Akron, specializing in environmental history, public history, and the United States since 1945.  He is currently working on two publications: an article that appeared in the International Journal of Social History in 2002 entitled "'Our Chronic and Desperate Situation': Pennsylvania, Deindustrialization, and the Emergence of Redevelopment Policy in the United States, 1945-1965" and a chapter in Beyond the Ruins: Deindustrialization and the Meanings of Modern America titled "Deindustrialization, Poverty, and Federal Area Redevelopment in the United States, 1945-1965," which will be published by Cornell University Press.  Dr. Wilson is also Publication Director of the Northeast Ohio Journal of History.