Geoffrey Champion Ward (born 1940) is an author, historian and writer of American History documentaries for Public Television.

The principal writer of the television mini-series The Civil War, Geoffrey C. Ward has collaborated with its co-producer Ken Burns on most of the documentaries he has made since, including Jazz, Baseball, The War, and "'Not For Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony'". The most recent Burns/Ward collaboration "Prohibition", premiered on PBS in 2011. This work has garnered him four Emmy Awards. He won two other Emmys for the American Experience series. His script for the documentary Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, won the Writer's Guild of America Award in 2005.

Geoffrey C. Ward is the author or co-author of eighteen books, including five companion books to the documentaries he has written. He was the founding editor of Audience Magazine, (1970-1973) and the editor of American Heritage Magazine, (1977-1982.) A First-class Temperament: the Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt, his biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His biography Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson won the 2006 William Hill Sports Book of the Year and the Anisfield-Wolf Award for best biography.

Wynton Learson Marsalis (born October 18, 1961) is a trumpeter, composer, teacher, music educator, and Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York City, United States. Marsalis has promoted the appreciation of classical and jazz music often to young audiences. Marsalis has been awarded nine Grammys in both genres, and a jazz recording of his was the first of its kind to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Marsalis is the son of jazz musician Ellis Marsalis, Jr. (pianist), grandson of Ellis Marsalis, Sr., and brother of Branford (saxophonist), Delfeayo (trombonist), Mboya, and Jason (drummer).

Wynton was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on October 18, 1961, the second of six sons of Dolores (née Ferdinand) and Ellis Louis Marsalis, Jr., a pianist and music professor. At an early age, he exhibited an aptitude for music. At age eight, Wynton performed traditional New Orleans music in the Fairview Baptist Church band led by banjoist Danny Barker, and at 14, he performed with the New Orleans Philharmonic. During high school, Wynton performed with the New Orleans Symphony Brass Quintet, New Orleans Community Concert Band, New Orleans Youth Orchestra, New Orleans Symphony, various jazz bands and with a local funk band, the Creators.

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.

Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.

Brandon Ward (born December 11, 1972 in Westerville, Ohio) is a retired U.S. soccer midfielder who played one season in Major League Soccer as well as the USISL and National Professional Soccer League.

Ward attended the Indiana University, playing on the men’s soccer team from 1991 to 1994. In his senior season, the Hoosiers went to the NCAA Men's Soccer Championship only to lose to the Virginia Cavaliers. Various sources place Ward with three different teams during 1995, the Hampton Roads Mariners, Richmond Kickers and Indiana Blast. On February 7, 1996, the Columbus Crew selected Ward in the sixth round (fifty-first overall) of the 1996 MLS Inaugural Player Draft. He played six games for the Crew before being released. He then joined the St. Louis Ambush in the National Professional Soccer League. He spent two seasons with the Ambush before being again being drafted by the Crew, this time in the first round of the 1998 MLS Supplemental Draft. The Crew released him on April 1, 1998 before Ward played a game. He then signed with the Chicago Stingers of the USISL.