Charles Fuller is an American playwright best known for A Soldier's Play for which he received the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. In 1958, after attending Villanova University for only two years, Fuller joined the army as a petroleum laboratory technician. Though stationed in Japan and Korea for four years total, he does not discuss much of his overseas experience. However, the impact of his experience can clearly be seen in some of his best known plays about Army life. Following his service, Fuller returned to Philadelphia, where he worked as a housing inspector in the Ludlow Section. It was during this time that Fuller received insight into social breakdown and moral desperation of people living in poverty.

Professor Silber specializes in the history of the United States between the mid-19th century and the early 20th century, including the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Her scholarship focuses mainly on cultural and women's history, but the courses she teaches--on the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the American South--also examine society and politics in these periods. She is the author of numerous publications, including *The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 *(1993), which is an examination of Northerners' changing cultural attitudes towards the South after the Civil War, and *Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War *(2005). She also co-edited* Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War* (1992), *Yankee Correspondence: Civil War Letters Between New England Soldiers and the Homefront *(1996), and *Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the US Civil War *(2006). She has also consulted on a number of Civil War and women's history video projects and museum exhibits as well as served as Director of Women's Studies at Boston University.