Alan Taylor holds the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Chair in the Corcoran Department of History at the University of Virginia. Professor Taylor previously taught at the College of William and Mary, Boston University, and the University of California at Davis, and served as the Harmsworth Professor at Queens College, Oxford University. The author of ten books, his most recent, American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850, won the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History. Two of his previous titles — William Cooper’s Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early Republic (1995), and The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia (2013) — both won the Pulitzer Prize for American History.