Jay Sexton is the Kinder Institute Chair of Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Debtor Diplomacy: Finance and American Foreign Relations in the Civil War Era, 1837-1873 (2005); The Monroe Doctrine: Nation and Empire in Nineteenth-Century America (2011); A Nation Forged by Crisis: A New American History (2019); as well as several collaborative volumes that probe global dimensions of American history including (with Kristin Hoganson) Crossing Empires: Taking US History into Transimperial Terrain (2020).