Edward E. Baptist is an associate professor in the Department of History at Cornell University. His scholarship is centered on the 19th-century United States and, more broadly, the creation of the modern world. One specific research focus is the massive growth of slavery in the United States between the American Revolution and the Civil War, an expansion that shaped the emergence of both American and global capitalism. He teaches a wide variety of courses on U.S. political history, the history of slavery, and, of course, the history of American capitalism. Baptist studied at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and received his PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 1997.

Louis Hyman is an assistant professor in the Department of Labor Relations, Law, and History at Cornell University. His research interests focus on the history of capitalism in the United States. His first book, Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, focuses on the history of the political economy of debt; the book was selected as one of the 2011 Choice Top 25 Outstanding Books of the Year. His second book, Borrow: The American Way of Debt, also named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title, explains how American culture shaped finance and, in turn, how finance shaped culture. A former Fulbright scholar, Hyman earned a BA in history and mathematics at Columbia University and received his PhD in American history in 2007 from Harvard University.