Dr. Gunja SenGupta is a professor and former chair of the History Department at Brooklyn College. She is a past director of the Macaulay Honors College at Brooklyn College. Her expertise lies in 19th-century United States and slavery/abolition in the Indian Ocean; sectional conflict; and African-American and women’s history. She is the author of, among other works, two books, For God and Mammon: Evangelicals and Entrepreneurs, Masters and Slaves in Territorial Kansas (University of Georgia Press, 1996) and From Slavery to Poverty: The Racial Origins of Welfare in New York, 1840–1918 (NYU Press, 2009).