Contributors
Lee Arnold was the library director of HSP for thirty years (and jointly the COO for the last seven of those years). He holds a doctorate in information science from the University of South Africa. Besides history, he writes on travel, genealogy, biography, and cats.
Chase Castle is a cultural historian of music. He is an adjunct assistant professor of music history at the University of Delaware and received a PhD in music from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2024. Castle’s research explores American revivalism across the nineteenth century, focusing on racial politics in evangelical hymnody. He is also an active organist and choral conductor who performs most Sunday mornings at St. Mary’s Church, Hamilton Village, on the western edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus.
Shamele Jordon is a professional genealogist, producer, writer, and lecturer. Her biographical highlights include work as an award-winning TV producer of Genealogy Quick Start and a cofounder of the Black Genealogy Experience. Shamele has been a researcher for the PBS series Oprah’s Roots: African American Lives I and II and a NJ state library grant recipient for her research of Civil War burials in Lawnside, NJ. She is also the first vice president of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, an advisory board member and faculty at the Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research, Georgia Genealogical Society, an advisory board member of the National Family Reunion Institute, and former president of the African American Genealogy Group in Philadelphia.
Jennifer W. Reiss is currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is completing her dissertation project. Tentatively titled “Undone Bodies: Women and Disability in Early America,” the project focuses on the mutually constitutive nature of gender and disability prior to the age of institutionalization.
Jordan B. Smith is an associate professor of history at Widener University. He is the author of The Invention of Rum: Creating the Quintessential Atlantic Commodity, which will be released in September 2025.
Eric Trautman-Mosher is a PhD candidate at the University of New Hampshire. His work focuses on how the political economy of the Indian Trade in the eighteenth century influenced nation-building in British and Native North America, with a particular attention to the consumer habits of Native Americans in western Pennsylvania, Detroit, and the Illinois.
