Ross Dunn is Professor Emeritus of History at San Diego State University, where he taught African, Islamic, and world history. In his early career he specialized in North African history, publishing Resistance in the Desert: Moroccan Responses to French Imperialism, 1881-1912 (1977). Teaching world history inspired him to write The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, a Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (1987). This book is in its third edition. A leadership role in the project to write national standards for world history led to publication, with Gary B. Nash and Charlotte Crabtree, of History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997). In 2000 he edited the essay collection The New World History: A Teacher's Companion. He is an associate director of the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. In 2012 he received the annual Pioneers of World History award from the World History Association. He was the first elected president of that organization.

Laura J. Mitchell is associate professor at the University of California, Irvine, where she teaches African and world history. She strives to make sense of early-modern societies in a digital age and to make history accessible to diverse audiences. Her research on colonial southern Africa has been supported by grants from Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the UC Office of the President, and the Mellon Foundation. She has collaborated with a wide range of scholars and history educators, serving as president of the Forum on European Expansion and Global Interaction, as a member of the World History Association Executive Council, and as a co-chair of the AP World History Curriculum Assessment and Development Committee. Her book, Belongings: Property, Family and Identity in Colonial South Africa (Columbia University Press, 2009) won the American Historical Association’s Gutenberg-e Prize.