Sharon Ann Murphy is a professor of history at Providence College in Providence, RI. She is the author of Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America (2010, Johns Hopkins University Press), winner of the 2012 Hagley Prize for the best book in business history, and Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (2017, Johns Hopkins University Press). Her latest projects are an investigation of the public perception of banks around the Panic of 1819, and an examination of the relationship between banking and enslavement in the nineteenth century United States.