Paul J. Polgar is a historian of slavery, race, and abolition in the United States and broader Atlantic World. He joined the faculty of the Arch Dalrymple III Department of History at the University of Mississippi in 2015, after serving as a postdoctoral fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He received his B.S. from Boston University, his M.A. from George Mason University, and his Ph.D. from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His book, Standard-Bearers of Equality: America's First Abolition Movement recovers the racially inclusive vision of America's first abolition movement, created by a collation of black and white activists during the three decades following the American Revolution. By guarding and expanding the rights of people of African descent and demonstrating that black Americans could become virtuous citizens of the new Republic, these activists, whom Polgar names "first movement abolitionists," sought to end white prejudice and eliminate racial inequality. Beginning in the 1820s, however, colonization threatened to eclipse this racially inclusive movement. Colonizationists claimed that what they saw as permanent black inferiority and unconquerable white prejudice meant that slavery could end only if those freed were exiled from the United States. In pulling many reformers into their orbit, this radically different antislavery movement marginalized the activism of America's first abolitionists and obscured the racially progressive origins of American abolitionism. By reinterpreting the early history of American antislavery, Standard-Bearers of Equality illustrates that the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are as integral to histories of race, rights, and reform in the United States as the mid-nineteenth century. Professor Polgar regularly teaches undergraduate courses on American slavery, race, and freedom, in addition to the first half of the U.S. survey, as well as graduate courses on comparative emancipations and U.S. historiography through Reconstruction.