Sarah E. Gardner is Distinguished University Professor of History at Mercer University where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century America, the Civil War Era, Reconstruction and the Rise of Jim Crow, and the Civil War and Print Culture. Her scholarship largely focuses on print culture and the literary marketplace. She is the author most recently of Reviewing the South: The Literary Marketplace and the Southern Renaissance, 1920-1941 (Cambridge University Press, 2017). Her first book, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War explores many of the themes found her essay for Origins. Twitter handle is @BookHistorian.