John Suval is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States specializing in antebellum and Civil War-era political culture, democratic governance, public lands, the American West, and U.S.-Mexico borderlands. A former journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, 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 prize-winning book Dangerous Ground: Squatters, Statesmen, and the Antebellum Rupture of American Democracy is out with Oxford University Press. He is currently 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, the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the superb state historical societies of Kansas, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Oregon, and Pennsylvania, among other institutions. He lives with his family in Hampshire County, West Virginia.