Richard Bensel is Associate Chair and the Gary S. Davis Professor of Government at Cornell University. He is the author of, most recently, Passion and Preferences: William Jennings Bryan and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (Cambridge University Press, 2008), The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2004), and The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). Among his other publications are Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Sectionalism and American Political Development, 1880-1980 (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).