Richard Franklin Bensel is the Gary S. Professor of Government at Cornell University. He is the author of five books, including Yankee Leviathan (1991), The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (2004), The Political Economy of American Industrialization (2000: David Greenstone Prize, 2002), Passion and Preferences (2008), and Sectional Stress and American Political Development, 1880–1980 (1984).
