Larry Schweikart, a native Arizonian, went to Arizona State University and received a BA in Political Science, then went on the road with several different rock bands, opening for such 60s/70s acts as Steppenwolf and the James Gang. He abruptly decided he wanted to be a history professor, and received an MA from ASU in history, then a Ph.D. from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Since 1985 he has taught at the University of Dayton. Schweikart’s best selling books include Seven Events that Made America America, 48 Liberal Lies About American History, and his #1 NYTimes bestseller, with Mike Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States. Recently he completed a history of the modern world with Dave Dougherty, A Patriot’s History of the Modern World in two volumes. He has been on almost all media, from Al-Jazeera to Glenn Beck, from Tavis Smiley to Rush Limbaugh.

Since 2009, he has been a film producer. His documentary, “Rockin’ the Wall,” about rock music’s part in bringing down the Iron Curtain, appeared on PBS, and his current project, “Other Walls 2 Fall,” featuring Yanni, Clint Black, Busta Rhymes, and a heavy metal band from inside Tehran, is now starting to show nationally.

Tracy McKenzie joined the History Department in the fall of 2010 after twenty-two years on the faculty of the University of Washington, where he held the Donald W. Logan Endowed Chair in American History. For most of his professional career, his research has focused on the effects of the American Civil War on the economy and society of the Upper South. His first book, One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), investigated the economic effects of war and emancipation on the southern countryside, and received best-book awards from the Agricultural History Society and the American Historical Association-Pacific Coast Branch. His next monograph was Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Recipient of the annual Fletcher Pratt Literary Award for best non-fiction work on the Civil War, Lincolnites and Rebels explored the civil war within the Civil War by tracing the experience of a single community split asunder by the sectional crisis.

More recently, Professor McKenzie has turned his attention to the ways in which American evangelicals have remembered their national heritage; toward that end, he has recently written a book on memory of the “First Thanksgiving.” The First Thanksgiving: What the Real Story Tells Us about Loving God and Learning from History was published in October, 2013 by Intervarsity Press.

Rod Gragg is an award-winning author and historian. A former news journalist, he is the author of more than twenty books on a variety of historical topics. His work on the Battle of Gettysburg, Covered with Glory, won the James I. Robertson Award as the best Civil War history of the year.
Another work, Confederate Goliath: The Battle of Fort Fisher, earned the Fletcher Pratt Award from the New York City Civil War Roundtable and was the basis of a PBS documentary, and his recent book, My Brother’s Keeper: Christians Who Risked All to Protect Jewish Targets of the Holocaust, was named as a finalist for the 2017 Christian Book Award. Gragg’s latest release is The Word: The History of The Bible and How it Came to Us.
Gragg is director of the CresCom Bank Center for Military & Veterans Studies at Coastal Carolina University, where he also serves as an adjunct professor of history. He is a popular public speaker and has appeared on numerous national broadcast programs, including CBN News, Daystar TV, “Fox and Friends” on the Fox News Channel, and “Morning Joe” on MSNBC.
He and his wife live near Myrtle Beach, S.C., and are the parents of seven grown children.