David Fromkin (born 1932 Milwaukee, Wisconsin) is a noted author, lawyer, and historian, best known for his historical account on the Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), in which he recounts the role European powers played between 1914 and 1922 in creating the modern Middle East. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Fromkin has written seven books in total, with his most recent in 2007, The King and the Cowboy: Theodore Roosevelt and Edward the Seventh, Secret Partners

A graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Law School, he is University Professor, Professor of History, International Relations, and Law at Boston University, where he was also the Director of The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Long-Range Future. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Before his career as a historian, Prof. Fromkin was an attorney and political adviser. In the 1972 Democratic primary campaign, he served as a foreign-policy adviser to candidate Hubert Humphrey. As an attorney, he served as both prosecutor and defense counsel in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, then as an associate at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

David (Hebrew: דָּוִד, דָּוִיד, Modern David Tiberian Dāwîḏ; ISO 259-3 Dawid; Strong's Daveed; beloved; Arabic: داوود‎ or داود‎ Dāwūd) was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the second king of the United Kingdom of Israel and, according to the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, an ancestor of Jesus. David is seen as a major Prophet in Islamic traditions. His life is conventionally dated to c. 1040–970 BC, his reign over Judah c. 1010–1003 BC,^{[citation needed]} and his reign over the United Kingdom of Israel c. 1003–970 BC.^{[citation needed]} The Books of Samuel, 1 Kings, and 1 Chronicles are the only sources of information on David, although the Tel Dan stele records "House of David", which some take as confirmation of the existence in the mid-9th century BC of a Judean royal dynasty called the "House of David".

David is very important to Jewish, Christian and Islamic doctrine and culture. In Judaism, David, or David HaMelekh, is the King of Israel, and the Jewish people. Jewish tradition maintains that a direct descendant of David will be the Messiah. In Islam, he is known as Dawud, considered to be a prophet and the king of a nation. He is depicted as a righteous king, though not without faults, as well as an acclaimed warrior, musician, and poet, traditionally credited for composing many of the psalms contained in the Book of Psalms.

Victoria Fromkin (May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.

Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria Alexandra Landish on May 16, 1923. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1944. She married Jack Fromkin, a childhood friend from Passaic, in 1948, and they settled in Los Angeles, California. Their son, Mark, was born in 1950 and died in a car accident in 1966.

Fromkin was active in the Communist Party USA, reaching positions of party leadership in California, but she resigned from membership shortly after the revelations of Stalinist crimes by Nikita Krushchev in 1956. She decided to head back to school to study linguistics in her late 30s. She enrolled at UCLA, received her master's in 1963 and her Ph.D in 1965; her thesis was entitled, "Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation".

Robert Rodman is a professor of computer science at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rodman attended UCLA, where he worked closely with famed linguist Victoria Fromkin. He is perhaps best known for teaching at NC State University, and authoring the linguistics textbook An Introduction to Language a text that has undergone ten editions and been translated into more than seven languages.^{[citation needed]}. He is also a novelist, his work published by Boson Books in Raleigh, North Carolina.

*Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2010). An Introduction to Language (9th ed.). Boston, MA: Thomson Wadsworth. ISBN 978-1428263925. 

Nina Hyams (born 1952) is a full professor of linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles. Her primary research area is grammatical development in first language acquisition and is noted for her research into the acquisition of null subjects.