Timothy R. Mahoney is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the author of River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest (Cambridge, 1990) and Provincial Lives: Middle-Class Experience in the Antebellum Middle West (Cambridge, 1999). Collectively, this trilogy of books tells a comprehensive story of the transformations of the Midwest and nineteenth-century American society in general.