James E. Sanders is a Professor of History and teaches Latin America and World History at Utah State University. He received his PhD and MA from the University of Pittsburgh, and his BA from the University of Florida. His first book, published by Duke University Press, is Contentious Republicans: Popular Politics, Race, and Class in Nineteenth-Century Colombia. His most recent book is The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, also with Duke University Press. His current projects focus on rethinking the relation between capitalism and democracy in the nineteenth-century Americas and on challenging notions of American exceptionalism.