Linda Lear, biographer and historian, holds a Ph.D. in History from George Washington University. She has served as a Senior Smithsonian Research Associate, a Beinecke Fellow, Research Professor of Environmental History at George Washington University and Senior Research Scholar in History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is currently Senior Fellow of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives at Connecticut College where she is a Trustee Emeritus. In 1999, she was honored with the Goodwin-Niering Center Alumni Environmental Achievement Award. Her books include Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature; Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson; Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature, published in the UK by Penguin in paper as Beatrix Potter: The Extraordinary Life of a Victorian Genius, and Harold L. Ickes: The Aggressive Progressive, 1874-1933.