Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American History. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Congressional Violence in Antebellum America, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and the Civil War, and what it suggests about the institution of Congress, the nature of American sectionalism, the challenges of a young nation’s developing democracy, and the longstanding roots of the Civil War.