Mark Power Smith is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School. He is a political and intellectual historian, with a focus on the Civil War era. His first monograph – Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War (University of Virginia, 2022) – examines how a coalition within the Democratic Party, known as “Young America,” reshaped ideas about American nationalism during the middle of the nineteenth century. He has also published articles in the Journal of the Civil War Era, the Journal of the Early Republic, and American Nineteenth Century History on household government during the sectional crisis, a diplomatic incident in 1853 known as the Koszta Affair, and spiritualism as an element of popular culture in New York during the 1860s. Power Smith has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University, and then a Junior Research Fellow and lecturer at the University of Oxford.