Jonathan Earle, Roger Hadfield Ogden Dean of the Honors College at the Louisiana State University, is the author of Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, winner of the James Broussard First Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and the Byron Caldwell Smith Award; John Brown's Raid: A Brief History, With Documents; Major Problems in the Early Republic; and the Routledge Atlas of African American History.

He is also the co-editor, with Diane Mutti Burke, of a collection of essays on the Missouri/Kansas Border War called Bleeding Kansas, Bleeding Missouri: The Long Civil War on the Border. This collection is the product of a major public conference on the Civil War on the Border that was held at the Kansas City Public Library in November 2011. He has held a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Fellowship at the Huntington Library and won grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Hall Center for the Humanities. He is writing a book for Oxford University Press' Pivotal Moments in U.S. History series on the election of 1860. Previously, Earle was an associate professor at the University of Kansas, where he variously served as director of the University Honors Program and associate director of the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics.