Iver Bernstein

Dr. Bernstein is Professor of History at Washington University, where he has taught for eighteen years. He did his undergraduate work at Brown University, received his Ph.D. from Yale, and taught at Yale, New York University and University of Chicago before coming to Washington U.

His scholarly work centers on 19th-Century America and especially the era of the Civil War. He has published widely on topics ranging from Lincoln to slavery to the New York City Draft Riots during the Civil War (his 1990 Oxford University Press book on the New York draft riots is the definitive
work on that subject), and he has served as a commentator on The HistoryChannel, CSPAN Book TV, and has written or been interviewed for a varietyof print and on-line publications including the Washington Post and Newsweek.com.

His current book-in-progress is titled Lincoln's Body Politic(also to be published by Oxford), and is a study of American political life inthe 1850s. It looks at the crises of the prewar decade to understand howAmericans, North and South, came to the point where they were willing to sacrifice themselves for the nation-state in the Civil War.