Jesse Gant is a PhD candidate in the department of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A native of Janesville, Wisconsin, he wrote, with Nick Hoffman of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Wheel Fever: How Wisconsin Became a Great Bicycling State, published with the Wisconsin Historical Society Press in 2013. Jesse regularly writes and teaches in topics connected to the field of the Civil War Era. He is completing his dissertation on the antislavery movement as told from the vantage point of the many Midwesterners—white and black, men and women—who, he argues, played the decisive role in slavery’s “long” end in the United States. For several years running, he’s led an undergraduate course called “A History of Abolition” for the UW-Madison History Department.