Richard Bell is Professor of History at the University of Maryland. He received his PhD in American History from Harvard University. He is the author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World and Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, which was a finalist for the George Washington Prize and the Harriet Tubman Prize. He has held major research fellowships at Yale University, the University of Cambridge, and the Library of Congress and has received the National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award and the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.