Mark Power Smith

Mark Power Smith is a Junior Research Fellow at Mansfield College. He is interested in the political and intellectual history of the nineteenth-century United States, particularly the development of nationalism before the Civil War. His first book focuses on the role of Young America in antebellum political culture: a nationalist movement that nevertheless undermined political compromise through an aggressive program of territorial expansion, cultural autonomy and racial exclusion.

He has published articles on spiritualism as an element of urban popular culture and the construction of nationalism through the lens of a diplomatic dispute known as the Koszta Affair of 1853. He has also published a short biography of Abraham Lincoln with Connell Guides, and previously taught at Arizona State University in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies.

Twitter: @mpowersmith

Selected Publications

  • Young America: The Transformation of Nationalism before the Civil War. Forthcoming in spring 2022 with the University of Virginia Press.
  • “The Young America movement, the Koszta Affair of 1853 and the construction of nationalism before the Civil War” Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 41, (Spring 2021).
  • “Séances in the City: The ‘Operational Aesthetic’ and ‘Modern Spiritualism’ in the popular culture of New York City, 1865-1870” American Nineteenth Century History, Vol. 17, (January 2017).
  • “The Young America Movement and The Crisis of Household Politics,” The Panorama: Expansive Views from the Journal of the Early Republic, (July 2021).
  • The Connell Short Guide to President Lincoln (September 2017).