My dissertation, “Cultures of Emotion: Families, Friends, and the Making of the United States,” explored the centrality of families to the new republic’s economy and its governing institutions. Focusing specifically on several prominent families centered in North Carolina and Virginia, but whose networks extended throughout the country and stretched across the Atlantic, the dissertation showed that the work related to the presence and performance of emotion—what I refer to as affective labor—was inseparable from the work that drove economic ventures and political fortunes. Such an approach reveals that what we often imagine as private and personal had profound implications for public policy and economic development. Wealthy elites during this period had extensive interests in their states and the federal government, identifying so closely with these bodies that they collapsed their interests with the public interest and used their access to them to advance their families’ interests in the name of the public good. In this way, the new republic’s elites folded the institutions of federal and state government into their family networks, organizing their own lives and these developing institutions around the metaphor and idea of family. As my dissertation argued, these dynamics were built into the institutional structure of the new nation, creating a governing system intertwined with the familial networks of the elite. These familial metaphors and relationships continued to guide elite families as they struggled to negotiate the sectional conflicts that ultimately erupted in war.