Barbara F. Walter is one of the world’s leading experts on civil wars, violent extremism and domestic terror. She is the author of five books and dozens of articles on these subjects and is a contributor to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, the BBC and the PBS NewsHour. She has written for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time, The New Republic, Reuters and Foreign Affairs.

She is a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a TED2023 speaker. Her most recent book on civil wars, New York Times bestseller “How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them,” was named the best book of the year by The Times (UK), and one of the best books of the year by the Financial Times, Esquire and Prospect Magazine. The New York Times Book Review called the book “Required reading for anyone invested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government.”

Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. His books include, On Freedom (2024); On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017); and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (2018).

Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her most recent book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University Press), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and her edited volume, Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) was one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001. Her current project, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.