Sam Haselby is a historian of religion and American political culture. He earned his PhD at Columbia University, was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and has been a faculty member at the American University of Beirut and the American University in Cairo. His writings on U.S. politics and religion in historical perspective have appeared in The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, and The Guardian. He is working on a book about the opium trade. Currently, he is a visiting faculty member at Columbia University.