Little Platoon Seminar: John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

James W. Muller is a professor of political science at University of Alaska, Anchorage, where he has taught since 1983. He also serves as chairman of the Board of Academic Advisers of the International Churchill Society. Educated at Harvard University and the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, he is a by-fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He served as a White House fellow in 1983–84 and won the Alaska Governor’s Award for Distinguished Service to the Humanities in 2008.

Last year Professor Muller completed his definitive edition of The River War: An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Soudan by Winston Churchill after more than 30 years of meticulous work. This is the first time in over a century that the story has been told and published in its entirety. Muller’s book, published by St. Augustine’s Press in two volumes, is the first unabridged edition to appear since Churchill himself published the first edition in 1899.

Prior to his most recent accomplishment, Professor Muller edited two books about Winston Churchill, Churchill as Peacemaker (Cambridge University Press, 1997) and Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” Speech Fifty Years Later (University of Missouri Press, 1999), and new editions of two of Churchill’s interwar books, Thoughts and Adventures (ISI Books, 2009) and Great Contemporaries (ISI Books, 2012).

Dr. Nabors joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, in 2011 and now serves as the chairman of the department. Educated at Claremont McKenna College, the University of Chicago, and the University of Oregon, he has taught American government and political philosophy at Oregon State University and the University of Oregon. His current scholarly research is focused on the changing character of American government leading up to the Civil War and Reconstruction. His first book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction (University of Missouri Press, 2017), was recognized by the American Political Science Association as the best book of the year in American political thought. 

Prior to becoming a professor, Dr. Nabors was a high technology business executive in Portland, Oregon. He has remained actively engaged in supporting economic and civic development in his communities.

Dr. Nabors is from Fair Haven, New Jersey.

Craig Carlson is an independent scholar who lives in Anchorage, Alaska. He earned his B.A. in accounting and business administration at Concordia College, in Moorhead, Minnesota, in 1978 and his J.D. at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1981, serving as associate editor of the Minnesota Law Review from 1979 to 1981. He was a revenue officer technical advisor for the Internal Revenue Service from 1983 to 2022.