Virginia Anderson taught early American history at the University of Colorado Boulder from 1985 to 2021. She is the author of New England's Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (1992) and Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (2004). She is also a coauthor of the textbook The American Journey (7th edition, 2014). Her new book, The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution (2017), explores the personal as well as political transformations that shaped individual lives in unexpected ways as the revolutionary crisis unfolded.