Eugene P Trani (Ph.D.) is President Emeritus of Virginia Commonwealth University, having retired in 2009 after a nineteen-year term as president. A specialist in U.S. foreign affairs, Trani has written extensively on the historic development of U.S. relations with other countries, publishing The Treaty of Portsmouth: An Adventure in Rooseveltian Diplomacy. He is the author of The Presidency of Warren G. Harding, acknowledged by Book magazine as the definitive book on Harding's much documented term in office. He also is co-author, with Donald E. Davis, of The First Cold War: the Legacy of Woodrow Wilson in U.S.-Soviet Relations, and Distorted Mirrors: Americans and Their Relations with Russia and China in the Twentieth Century, recently published in the U.S., Russia, Spain and in Taiwan in Chinese, and The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: Harrison Salisbury and The New York Times.

Donald E Davis received his Ph.D. in Russian history at Indiana University and continued his teaching career at Illinois State University until 2004. He has published a number of articles and books and, while at Illinois State University, initiated student-faculty exchange programs with a number of Russian institutions. Davis is the editor of No East of West: The Memoirs of Paul B. Anderson. Since meeting in graduate school, Trani and Davis have had a working collaboration for almost thirty years. They have co-authored: The First Cold War; Distorted Mirrors; The Reporter Who Knew Too Much.