Professor Russell Menard of the University of Minnesota specializes in the economic and social history of the British colonies in North America. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1975. Most of his work has been on the economic, demographic, and social history of the Chesapeake region during the early colonial period, but his research interests include the origins of plantation slavery in British America, the economic development of the Lower South in the 18th century, and late 19th-century U.S. social history. Most recently, he has been doing work on the West Indies.