Burton Spivak received his PhD in American History at the University of Virginia where he was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow and a Virginia- Danforth Fellow, and taught at the University of Texas at Austin, Brown University, Bates College, and the University of Virginia. He is a former recipient of the Stuart L. Bernath Lecture Prize for outstanding achievement in teaching and scholarship, awarded annually by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His book Jefferson's English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo, and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1979) was included in C-SPAN's American Presidents: Life Portraits list of twenty-five recommended books on Thomas Jefferson. Spivak also received his JD degree from the University of Virginia where he was on the Law Review and Order of the Coif, and practiced tax law in New York City for many years. He currently is an Adjunct Professor of History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.