Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Experience how the lessons learned from the struggles and victories of the Harlem Renaissance gave Kareem Abdul-Jabbar the confidence, will, and inspiration to become a legendary basketball player and recognized humanitarian dedicated to achieving social justice around the world. Explore approaches to help all students embrace the stories of the past as prologue for the future. Together we can help young people adopt a personal commitment to themselves and future generations to become informed, responsible, engaged citizens dedicated to creating a better world for all.

Everyone in attendance will receive a free teachers’ kit, including a copy of On the Shoulders of Giants, free poster of the soon-to-released movie version of Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s book, and access to the online interactive study guide (kit valued at $100).

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Hugh Ambrose

Hugh Ambrose is a noted historian and was a consultant on the documentary Price for Peace, for which Steven Spielberg and Mr. Ambrose’s father, Stephen Ambrose, were the executive producers. He was a consultant to his father on his books, and is also serving as a historical consultant on HBO’s The Pacific miniseries. Ambrose has led battlefield tours through Europe and along the Pacific Rim. He lives in Helena, Montana.

Mr. Ambrose’s first book, THE PACIFIC was published in March 2010 and has been a bestseller in both the U.S. and the U.K.

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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.

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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. His second book, The Blueprint: How the Democrats Won Colorado (and Why Republicans Everywhere Should Care), co-authored with Rob Witwer, has just been published.

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. She has taught social studies for 15 years at public and independent schools in New York and Hawaii. She is currently an Education Specialist at the East West Center, where she facilitates educational exchange and collaboration between teachers and students in the U.S. and Asia. She is author of the forthcoming children's book, Ladder to the Moon, to be published in early 2011.

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 also received the 1999 NCSS Exemplary Research in Social Studies Award. 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

My Journey from Evil to Heroism

Philip Zimbardo is one of the most distinguished living psychologists, having served as President of the American Psychological Association, designed and narrated the award winning 26-part PBS series, Discovering Psychology, and has published more than 50 books and 400 professional and popular articles and chapters, among them, Shyness, The Lucifer Effect, and The Time Paradox. A professor emeritus at Stanford University, Dr. Zimbardo has spent 50 years teaching and studying psychology. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University, and his areas of focus include time perspective, shyness, terrorism, madness, and evil. Best-known for his controversial Stanford Prison Experiment that highlighted the ease with which ordinary intelligent college students could cross the line between good and evil when caught up in the matrix of situational and systemic forces. Dr. Zimbardo’s appearance is generously sponsored by Annenberg Media.