Specializing in race, slavery, and empire, Dr. Christa Dierksheide is the author of Amelioration and Empire (2014), Beyond Jefferson (2024), and Jefferson’s Wolf (2026, with Nicholas Guyatt). Her research explores state formation, slavery, and freedom in the U.S. and the Atlantic world from the 18th to 19th centuries.

In addition to academic writing, Dr. Dierksheide has curated public history projects at Monticello, including Sally Hemings: A Life and Mulberry Row: Landscape of Slavery. As Director of the Center for the Study of the Age of Jefferson at UVA, she supports research, fellowships, and public programming on Jefferson and the early republic.

At UVA, Dr. Dierksheide teaches courses on Jefferson, public history, slavery, and early American law and works closely with graduate students studying the revolutionary and early national periods.

Connie López teaches fifth-grade social studies at the University School of Nashville, an independent K–12 school in Tennessee. With over 20 years of experience in education, she has also taught at the second, third, and seventh-grade levels. Connie is dedicated to creating learner-centered, experiential experiences that are multimodal and grounded in culturally responsive practices. Her instruction is rooted in evidence-informed strategies, and she intentionally designs curriculum to cultivate a problem-solving mindset to spark curiosity. Connie has earned several honors, including PBS LearningMedia Digital Innovator, Humanities Tennessee Outstanding Educator, and Gilder Lehrman Teacher of the Year for Tennessee. 

Justin Emrich, an American history teacher from central Ohio with twenty-five years of experience, was named the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Ohio History Teacher of the Year in 2016. Over the past six years, he has served as a master teacher for the Institute and actively led and participated in both in-person and online seminars on the Civil Rights Movement, Abraham Lincoln, Native American history and various other topics across the country. Additionally, he contributes to multiple teacher advisory committees for national organizations. Justin remains passionate about history education’s role in helping students understand the past and present and contribute to a better future.  

Samantha Seeley is an Associate Professor of History at University of Richmond, where she specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century North America and the early United States.

Her first book, Race, Removal, and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States, recasts the nation’s origin story by investigating the roots of removal in the United States. The book examines why legislators, state and federal officials, reformers, intellectuals, and ordinary people pitched removal as a solution to the unresolved “problems” of the American Revolution — land hunger, war debts, and slavery and emancipation. These early proposals aimed at removing Indigenous people and African Americans from the states and the nation became the precursors to the better-known projects of Jacksonian Indian removal and Liberian colonization. In the years after the American Revolution, people claimed a dual set of rights — the right to remain and the right to remove others — that would define the borders of belonging in the early United States.

At University of Richmond, Samantha teaches survey courses on the American Revolution, the early United States, slavery and freedom, and U.S. empire, as well as upper-level seminars on the Atlantic World, historiography, and public history. She is always eager to work with students on summer research and thesis projects.

Dale Hoggatt has been a member of the professional education community for thirty-four years (not counting his own kindergarten–master’s experiences). He taught in Oklahoma City during the terrorist bombing of 1995 and in Joplin, Missouri, during the EF5 tornado and recovery of 2011. He is a recognized, award-winning educator, most recently named the 2021 Missouri History Teacher of the Year. He is currently a master teacher with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and a humble member of the faculty at Pittsburg State University in Kansas. 

Justin Emrich, an American history teacher from central Ohio with twenty-five years of experience, was named the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s Ohio History Teacher of the Year in 2016. Over the past six years, he has served as a master teacher for the Institute and actively led and participated in both in-person and online seminars on the Civil Rights Movement, Abraham Lincoln, Native American history and various other topics across the country. Additionally, he contributes to multiple teacher advisory committees for national organizations. Justin remains passionate about history education’s role in helping students understand the past and present and contribute to a better future.  

Reconstruction is a neglected period in American education. This is not because it is unimportant—this course will make the case that it is perhaps the most important era in terms of the creation of modern America—but because it is divisive and contested. Resistance to Reconstruction began immediately, never ceased, and has over the years been quite successful. There is resistance to the ideals of Reconstruction, and there is resistance to the teaching of Reconstruction. This course will place Reconstruction and the resistance to it in historical context, illuminating how Reconstruction broke from America’s past, how its radicalism was undermined and its promise beaten down, and how the struggles of that era continue today.