Michael Phillips is a professor of American history at Collin College in Plano, Texas. He specializes in the history of American race and gender relations, politics, religion, and extremist groups. Phillips received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Texas at Austin in 2002. Phillips revised his award-winning dissertation, subsequently published by the University of Texas Press in 2006 as “White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas, 1841-2001,” which was awarded the T.R. Fehrenbach Book Award for Best Book on Texas History by the Texas Historical Commission in 2007. He also co-authored (with Patrick Cox) The House Will Come to Order: How the Texas Speaker Became a Power in State and National Politics (2010) and contributed essays that appeared in The Harlem Renaissance in the West: The New Negroes’ Western Experience and Beyond Texas Through Time: Breaking Away From Past Interpretations (both in 2011). He also authored numerous chapters that appear in both volumes of The American Challenge: A New History of the United States, published by Abigail Press.

Keith J. Volanto earned a M.A. in History from California State University, Sacramento in 1990, and a Ph.D. in History from Texas A&M University in 1998. He is currently Professor of History at Collin College in Plano, Texas where he teaches Texas and American history courses. In 2005, Dr. Volanto published Texas, Cotton, and the New Deal, which was a finalist for the best book in Texas history awarded by the Texas State Historical Association. He is also the author of five scholarly articles covering twentieth-century Texas and other historical topics, as well as numerous book reviews and encyclopedia entries.