Richard Edwards retired as Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies and Professor of Economics at the University of Nebraska. Holder of a Ph.D. from Harvard and author of sixteen books, he began studying homesteading a dozen years ago and is the author with Jacob Friefeld and Rebecca Wingo of Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History (2017). He led the study of Black homesteaders now featured on the National Park Service website as “African American Homesteaders in the Great Plains”. His team conducted the study in collaboration with Homestead National Historical Park (Nebraska) and Nicodemus Historic Site (Kansas). He is a board member of the Nicodemus Historical Society and the Dearfield Preservation Committee. He now lives in Denver.
Jacob K. Friefeld is the Director of the Center for Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. His first book (with Richard Edwards and Rebecca Wingo), Homesteading the Plains: Toward a New History, examines the Homestead Act of 1862, one of the most important social policies ever enacted in the United States. Friefeld has a passion for making history accessible for broad audiences through his writing, public speaking, and public history work at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois where he serves as research historian.