Carol Kammen has been the Tompkins County Historian in New York since 2000. She has taught history at Tompkins Cortland Community College and Cornell University for many years, and she wrote editorials for History News for twenty-five years and a column for the Ithaca Journal for forty years. Kammen is the editor of The Local History Encyclopedia and author of On Doing Local History and Zen and the Art of Local History, among many other books.