Adam Arenson is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a Ph.D. from Yale University. He is a historian of nineteenth-century North America, investigating the cultural and political history of slavery, Civil War, and Reconstruction and tracing the development of American cities, especially in the American West and its borderlands.

His first book, The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2011) is now available. He has presented preliminary research from After the Underground Railroad at the biennial Association for Canadian Studies in the United States conference, and as an invitee to the Borderlands/Borderlines symposium at the Library of Congress in 2010. He has also published a half-dozen articles, including pieces on Dred Scott’s family and Anglo-Saxonism in the Yukon Territory. He is a regular contributor to the Making History Podcast blog.