Editorial Advisory Board

The following historians offer their expertise to help make NorthCarolinahistory.org an authoritative source of North Carolina history.

Professor Broadwater’s publications include Jefferson, Madison, and the Making of the Constitution (2019), James Madison: A Son of Virginia and a Founder of a Nation (2012); George Mason, Forgotten Founder (2006); Adlai Stevenson and American Politics: The Odyssey of a Cold War Liberal (1994); and Eisenhower and the Anti-Communist Crusade (1992). He also co-edited, with Troy Kickler, North Carolina’s Revolutionary Founders (2019).  

Before coming to Barton, Professor Broadwater was director of the John C. Stennis Oral History Project at Mississippi State University. He holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and a law degree from the University of Arkansas. 

Professor Gamble is author of The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003). His essays and reviews have appeared in The Journal of Southern History, The Intercollegiate Review, Chronicles, The Freeman, The Independent Review, and Humanitas, for which he also serves on the editorial board.

John Hood is president of the John William Pope Foundation, a Raleigh-based grantmaker. He is also the author of 10 books—ranging from economic histories and political biographies to fantasy novels —and teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy.

Since 1986, Hood has written a syndicated column that now runs in the Winston-Salem Journal, Greensboro News & Record, Wilmington Star-News, Triangle Business Journal, and newspapers in 50 other North Carolina communities. He’s also written for the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, National Review, Readers’ Digest, the New Republic, and dozens of other newspapers and magazines, and appeared on CNN, Fox News, NBC, and National Public Radio.

Hood chairs the North Carolina Institute of Public Leadership, co-chairs the North Carolina Leadership Forum, and serves as vice-chair of North Carolina Public Radio, State Policy Network, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. He also co-founded the Freedom Conservatism project and formerly led the John Locke Foundation as its president for more than two decades.

Hood received his B.A. in journalism from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned an M.A. in liberal studies from UNC-Greensboro.

Historian Wilfred M. McClay has taught in many universities, including the University of Oklahoma, Tulane, Georgetown, John Hopkins, and University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He recently wrote Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, published in 2019. In 1995, the Organization of American Historians named his book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America the best book in American intellectual history that year.

Professor McClay has been a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center,  and a past president of the Philadelphia Society. He is chairman of the board for the National Association of Scholars and a member of the board of the Jack Miller Center. In 2022 he received the coveted Bradley Prize. Currently, he serves on the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, which is planning the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.

Willis P. Whichard is the only person in North Carolina history who has served in both the North Carolina House of Representatives and the North Carolina Senate and both the North Carolina Court of Appeals and the North Carolina Supreme Court. He also served as dean and professor of law at Campbell University.

Judge Whichard is the author of A Consequential Life: David Lowry Swain, Nineteenth-Century North Carolina, and Their University, which covers the formative years of the University of North Carolina. He also wrote the biography Justice James Iredell, which presents the life of a leading Federalist in North Carolina who became one of the original justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.