Amy Stanley is a professor in the History Department at Northwestern University. She can often be found lecturing about global history, but she is most at home in early modern Japan, specifically in the great city of Edo (now Tokyo). Like many social historians, she is happiest when reading other people's correspondence and perusing shopping lists from 200 years ago. She knows a lot about samurai, and she can tell you all about the condition of the toilets in Edo Castle, but you probably don't want to know. When she's not dwelling in the nineteenth century, she is in Evanston, IL, with her husband, two little boys, and a mutt who may actually be a Catahoula Leopard Dog.