Ari Kelman is a historian of the Civil War and Reconstruction, the politics of memory, and Native American history. Author of Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War andA Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek.

Historians Imagine is a monthly webinar devoted to this dimension of the craft. Patty Limerick and Matthew Jacobson talk with path-breaking historians about the inventiveness and vision of their work, and about the more mysterious aspects of their practices—their imaginative spark and the virtues that lie beyond rigor and out of reach of your typical "how to" manual. These conversations will appeal to professional historians, to be sure, and might offer liberation from the academy's constraints and the disciplining demands of convention. But they will equally engage anyone who is interested in how new stories are made from old materials, and how great storytellers and historical sleuths think to do what they do.

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board at CU Boulder's Center of the American West. Matthew Frye Jacobson is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History at Yale. He is the author of seven books on race, politics, and culture in the United States.