John Suval is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States specializing in antebellum political culture,  public lands, democratic governance, the American West, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands.  A former journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2018, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Missouri’s Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy,  and  worked as a Research Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, serving as an  editor of The Papers of Andrew Jackson. His book Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy is now out with Oxford University Press.  He  recently moved to Hampshire County, West Virginia, where he is at work on a new book—Visionaries & Reactionaries: The Battle for America in the Age of Whitman and Pierce—exploring the intersections between the great cultural renaissance and acute political crisis of the 1850s. His research has received support from the Bancroft Library, University of Chicago Library Special Collections Research Center, Kansas Historical Society, Library Company of Philadelphia, Oregon Historical Society, and other institutions.