Lauren Haumesser, a 2010 Boston College graduate, conducts a fresh examination of antebellum politics by examining the ways that gender issues and gendered discourse exacerbated fissures within the Democratic Party in her book The Democratic Collapse: How Gender Politics Broke a Party and a Nation, 1856-1861 (University of North Carolina Press). Haumesser traces how northern and southern Democrats and their partisan media organs used gender to make powerful arguments about slavery as the sectional crisis grew, from the emergence of the Republican Party to secession. Gendered charges and countercharges turned slavery into an intractable cultural debate, raising the stakes of every dispute and making compromise ever more elusive. Haumesser was a history major at BC and holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Virginia.