Brian Schoen is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Master of Social Sciences program at Ohio University where he teaches early US history, the American Civil War, and Capitalism and its Critics: An Intellectual History. His first book, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War, won the Southern Historical Association Bennett H. Wall book award. He has published broadly on early American political economy, politics, and diplomatic history.