Michael J. Lee is a professor at the College of Charleston where he teaches and researches in political communication. His first book, Creating Conservatism: Postwar Words that Made an American Movement (Michigan State, 2014), won five national book awards. His latest book (co-authored with R. Jarrod Atchison) is We Are Not One People: Secession and Separatism in American Politics Since 1776 (Oxford, 2022).