A native Hoosier and former newspaper reporter, Ray E. Boomhower has worked at the Indiana Historical Society since 1987, serving as editor of the society's quarterly popular history magazine, Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History, since 1999. He is the author of numerous articles and books on the nineteenth state, including biographies of such notable Hoosiers as Benjamin Harrison, Gus Grissom, Ernie Pyle, Lew Wallace, May Wright Sewall, John Bartlow Martin, Jim Jontz and Alex Vraciu. In 1998, he received the Hoosier Historian Award from the HIS, and in 2010, he was named winner of the Regional Author Award in the annual Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Awards.