The Advisors

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Alan Berolzheimer is the project historian for the Flow of History, a history education network providing professional development services for teachers in Vermont and New Hampshire through funding from the federal Teaching American History grant program. He has directed the publications program of the Vermont Historical Society since 1998. He has taught U.S. History at Norwich University and Colby-Sawyer College.

Cynthia Bittinger was Executive Director of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation from 1990-2010. She is an Instructor of Women in U.S. History and Vermont history at the Community College of Vermont. She is author of Grace Coolidge, Sudden Star, a book in a series on first ladies, and she has written about history for The New England Journal of History and other publications. She is a founding member of the Vermont Women's History Steering Committee of the Vermont Commission on Women, a board member of the Vermont Alliance for the Social Studies, and a commentator for Vermont Public Radio and an op-ed writer for the Rutland Herald.

Marilyn Blackwell, Ph.D. is a writer and historian. She has worked at the Vermont Historical Society and taught history at UVM, Norwich University, and Community College of Vermont. She recently published Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood. She co-authored a history of East Montpelier, Vermont, and has published numerous articles about Vermont and women's history in state and national history journals.

Joe Bookchin is Vermont Film Commissioner. He was an assistant producer for CBS News and its syndicated program News Path. In Hollywood for five years, Bookchin worked at Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers, for such producers as Bob Weiss (Crazy People) and Dan Kolsrud (Grumpy Old Men) and for directors Tony Bill and Dan Aykroyd. Bookchin started the film production program at Burlington College. He has produced and directed documentaries and news segments for many clients, including for the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts and a segment for the Vermont Public Television series "Points North – Arts in Vermont."

Dona Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont, where she teaches courses in U.S. cultural history, New England history, and Vermont history. Her book, Inventing New England: Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century, explores the significance of the tourist trade in creating an enduring image of New England. She is the editor of a collection of 19th century tourist stories: A Tourist's New England: Travel Fiction, 1820-1920. She is currently working on a book about American back-to-the-land movements in the 20th century.

Frank Bryan is John G. McCullough Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont since 1976. Bryan is known throughout New England both as a both a humorist and a serious scholar. He authored Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works; The Vermont Papers; and Politics in the Rural States. He was chosen "one of New England's leading humorists" by Yankee magazine. Bryan has appeared on CBS's Sunday Morning, the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, and more recently with Brian Williams, Fox's The O'Reilly Factor, Bill Moyers' The Public Mind, and was featured in Ted Turner's Portrait of America film series. Bryan is also a former Golden Gloves boxer and rodeo bull rider. His current interests include hunting, fishing, trapping, oxen, stamp collecting, and poker.

Deborah Clifford (in memoriam) was an author and independent scholar who wrote three biographies of 19th-century New England women, including The Passion of Abby Hemenway: Memory, Spirit, and the Making of History; as well as The Troubled Roar of the Waters: Vermont in Flood and Recovery, 1927-1931. She was also the Associate Editor of Historic Roots: a Magazine of Vermont History (intended for adults who read at the 4th - 5th grade level), and she was a member of the Vermont Commission on Women's Vermont Women's History Project.

Howard Coffin, a seventh generation Vermonter, has written three books on the Civil War: Full Duty, Vermonters in the Civil War; Nine Months to Gettysburg; and The Battered Stars. He has also published Guns Over the Champlain Valley, a history of, and guide to, the military sites of the Lake Champlain corridor; An Inland Sea, a history of the Catholic Church in Vermont, and a book on the University of Vermont. Coffin is former press secretary to Senator Jim Jeffords and co-authored with Jeffords An Independent Man. He was an environmental and political reporter for the Rutland Daily Herald and a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor. Coffin is now researching books on Civil War sites in all of Vermont's 251 towns and cities and on Calvin Coolidge's writings.

Kevin Dann, Historian, naturalist, and troubadour, is the author of ten books, including Bright Colors Falsely Seen: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge; Across the Great Border Fault: The Naturalist Myth in America; and Lewis Creek Lost and Found. He has taught at Rutgers University, University of Vermont, and SUNY Plattsburgh.

Nancy Gallagher is an independent scholar, historian and author of Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (1999); “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History” www.uvm.edu/~eugenics (2001).

Greg Guma is an author, editor, manager, and progressive activist. He has edited a variety of publications, including the Vanguard Press, the state's first commercial alternative weekly; Toward Freedom, a Vermont-based international affairs newsletter founded in 1952; and Vermont Guardian. He was recently the former Executive Director of the Pacifica Foundation, parent corporation of the Pacifica radio network. He has authored documentary scripts, plays and books, including The People's Republic: Vermont and the Sanders Revolution, Uneasy Empire: Repression, Globalization and What We Can Do, and Spirits of Desire, a historical novel set in Vermont. Greg has launched a blog, Maverick Media, covering media politics, the alternative press, and his life in Vermont.

Samuel Hand is professor emeritus in U.S. history at the University of Vermont, where he taught from 1961 until his retirement in 1994. Since then, he has authored several books on Vermont history, including The Essential Aiken, A Vermont Encyclopedia, The Star that Set: The Vermont Republican Party, 1854-1974: and Vermont Voices, A Documentary History of the Green Mountain State (with Kevin Graffagnino & Gene Sessions). He is a former president of the Vermont Historical society, and a recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Center for Research on Vermont and a Founders Circle Award from the Ethan Allen Homestead.

Madeleine Kunin was Vermont's first woman governor, from 1985 to 1991. She is a former Vermont state legislator and Lieutenant Governor. She served as U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and as U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education in the Clinton Administration. She has received more than 20 honorary degrees. Kunin has a dual appointment at the University of Vermont in Burlington and St. Michael's College, as Distinguished Visiting Professor in Political Science. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Politics, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also a commentator on Vermont Public Radio. She is the author of Pearls, Politics, and Power: How Women Can Win and Lead, Living a Political Life, and The Big Green Book.

John Moody is an ethnohistorian and independent scholar with thirty years of research, writing, and speaking focused on the Native peoples of the northeast. His research includes ethnobotany, the ethnic medical traditions in the northeast as well as the roots of war and peace making.

Donna Roberts Moody Donna Roberts Moody is an Abenaki mother of three, and grandmother of twelve. She is an author, public speaker, educator, and writer and is the Director of Winter Center for Indigenous Traditions which is based in the Upper Valley of Vermont and New Hampshire. She is also the Repatriation and Site Protection Coordinator for the Abenaki Nation in northern New England. The Moodys work to preserve Abenaki burial sites, and to repatriate and rebury Abenaki ancestral remains that have been disturbed in Vermont and New Hampshire, on behalf of a number of Western Abenaki tribal bands and families. They also offer public programs on local Native history, community responsibility, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

Bruce Post has served on the staff of some of the nation’s and Vermont’s most prominent political figures, including Hubert Humphrey, John B. Anderson, Jim Jeffords, Dick Mallary, Richard Snelling and Robert Stafford. He also has managed a statewide teachers union and worked in the non-profit sector. The National Education Association named his Riding the Winds of Change: A Primer in Political Action the best political action video in 1990. In 1993, the National Public Health Coalition gave its Gold Award for excellence to Rural Health Matters, which he edited and wrote.

Gregory Sanford has been Vermont State Archivist since 1982. He served as assistant director of the George D. Aiken Project at the University of Vermont and as the oral history coordinator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was written widely on the Vermont experience. He was the recipient of the 2002 New England Archivists Distinguished Service Award for sustained contributions to the profession.

John Scagliotti is an award-winning filmmaker, television producer, radio broadcaster, and the creator and executive producer of In the Life, the first gay and lesbian national series on PBS, now in its 17th season. His documentaries include Before Stonewall (1985), After Stonewall (1999), and Dangerous Living: Coming Out in the Developing World (2003). Scagliotti is program director of CineSlam, a glbt film festival of shorts in Brattleboro, and he is at work on a prequel to Before Stonewall, the documentary Before Homosexuals, From Ancient Times to Victorian Crimes.

Michael Sherman was recently Academic Dean of Burlington College, and he has taught at Vermont College, Union Institute & University, and Lawrence University. He served as Director of the Vermont Historical Society, he is the co-author with Gene Sessions and P. Jeffrey Potash of Freedom and Unity: A History of Vermont, published in 2004, and author of articles and reviews on Vermont history and the humanities in public life, as well as other books of essays on Vermont history, the humanities and public life. Sherman is currently editor of Vermont History, the journal of the Vermont Historical Society.

Peg Tassey, our music consultant, is a singer/songwriter and photographer. An avid lover of all kinds of music, she and her bands have been part of the music scene in Vermont for many years.

Rick Winston was owner and manager the Savoy Theater in Montpelier with his wife Andrea Serota until 2010. He founded the weekly Lightning Ridge Film Society in 1981. He has taught film appreciation at Goddard College, Community College of Vermont and the Osher Lifelong Learning Program. He has been the programmer of the Green Mountain Film Festival from its inception in 1999: GreenMountainFilmFestival.org.

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