Da Chen

Da Chen grew up in a tiny village in the deep south of China. During the Cultural Revolution, his family was beaten, his father thrown in reform camp, and at age nine, he was threatened with imprisonment. He learned English from a Baptist professor, who opened him to the possibility of another world. After graduating from Beijing Languages and Culture University and serving after graduation as an English professor, Mr. Chen arrived in the U.S. at the age of 23, and graduated from Columbia University School of Law. His first memoir, Colors of the Mountain, was compared to Angela’s Ashes, and became a best-seller. His second memoir, Sounds of the River, continues his story as a teenager leaving the farm to his university life in Beijing. Mr. Chen’s appearance is generously sponsored by HarperCollins Publishers.

Tom Daccord

Tom Daccord is creator and co-director of the Center for Teaching History with Technology, a 15-year history teacher, and co-director of EdTechTeacher, Inc. He is an educational technology trainer and speaker, and author of Best Ideas for Teaching with Technology: A Practical Guide for Teachers by Teachers and The Best of History Web Sites. A veteran "laptop teacher" who instructed in a wireless laptop environment for seven years, Mr. Daccord serves as Special Advisor to Massachusetts Computers in Education (MassCUE) and the Massachusetts chapter of ASCD. He is also creator of the NCSS Community online network.

Kenneth C. Davis

Ken Davis is the author of Don’t Know Much About History, which spent 35 consecutive weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, and gave rise to the Don’t Know Much About series, which has a combined in-print total of 4.3-million copies. Ken Davis has been dubbed “The King of Knowing” by Amazon.com because he becomes a subject expert in all of the areas he writes about—the Bible, Mythology, the Universe, the Civil War. Mr. Davis’s success aptly makes the case that Americans don’t hate history, just the dull version they slept through in class. His approach is to refresh us on the subjects we should have learned in school. He does it by busting myths, setting the record straight and always remembering that fun is not a four-word letter word. Mr. Davis’s appearance is generously sponsored by HarperCollins Publishers.

Dr. Patty Limerick

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where she is also Professor of History. Dr. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. She is a prolific essayist and author of The Legacy of Conquest and Desert Passages. She has received a number of awards and honors, including the MacArthur Fellowship and the Hazel Barnes Prize, the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research. Under Dr. Limerick’s leadership, the Center of the American West serves as a forum committed to the civil, respectful, problem-solving exploration of important, often contentious, Western issues. Dr. Limerick’s appearance is generously sponsored by The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

Adam Schrager

Adam Schrager covers politics for KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver. In more than 15 years in the business, he has won numerous broadcast journalism accolades, including more than a dozen Emmy awards. He is the author of The Principled Politician, the forgotten story of Colorado Governor Ralph Carr, the only political leader in the United States to welcome Japanese-American citizens to his state during World War II.

Maya Soetoro-Ng

From 2007 to 2008, Maya Soetoro-Ng was an avid campaigner for her brother, President Barack Obama, for whom she worked on outreach to teachers, women, Latinos, and Asian Pacific Americans. Part of her campaign work involved visiting schools and discussing Obama’s education platform. She has a long and rich background in global and multicultural education. From 2000 to 2006, she was a lecturer in the University of Hawaii's College of Education, teaching classes about multicultural education and the history of education. She is currently a high school teacher at La Pietra (a school for young women) and teaches World Cultures, U.S. History and the Constitution, and Peacemakers (a course she designed around one of her lifelong commitments - the power of nonviolence).

Dr. Sam Wineburg

As Director of the Stanford University History Education Group, Sam Wineburg's work engages questions of identity and history in modern society: how today's Instant Messengerized youth use the past to construct individual and collective identities. Over the last fifteen years Dr. Wineburg’s interests have ranged from how adolescents and professional historians interpret primary sources to issues of teacher assessment and teacher community in the workplace. His book, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, won the 2002 Frederic W. Ness Award from the Association of American Colleges and Universities for the book "that best illuminates the goals and practices of a contemporary liberal education." He is the Executive Producer of the National Clearinghouse for History Education, a collaboration between George Mason University, Stanford, and the American Historical Association. Professor Wineburg’s appearance is generously sponsored by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Dr. Philip Zimbardo

Philip Zimbardo is an internationally recognized as the “voice and face of contemporary American psychology” through is PBS-TV series, “Discovering Psychology,” his classic research, the Stanford Prison Experiment, authoring the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, in its 19th Edition, and his popular trade books, Shyness: What it is, what to do about it and The Shy Child. Dr. Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now an Emeritus Professor) and is currently on the faculty of the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology , the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, CA. His more than 300 professional publications and 50 books convey his research interests in the domain of social psychology, with a broad spread of interests from shyness to time perspective, madness, cults, political psychology, torture, terrorism, and evil. His latest book, a New York Times bestseller, is The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Dr. Zimbardo’s appearance is generously sponsored by Annenberg Media.