Mitchell Snay is professor of history at Denison University, where he focuses on the middle period (c. 1815-1877) of American history. Before teaching at Denison, he was lecturer at Harvard University. His first book, Gospel of Disunion: Religion and Separatism in the Antebellum South (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), was on religion and the intellectual origins of antebellum southern separatism. His next books, Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, co-edited with John R. McKivigan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998) and Fenians, Freedmen, and Southern Whites: Race and Nationality in the Era of Reconstruction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), looked at several movements for ethnic autonomy and political self-determination during Antebellum and Reconstruction. His most recent book, Horace Greeley and the Politics of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2011), was a biography of editor and reformer Horace Greeley that attempted to place the editor and reformer in his historical context.