Benjamin Carter Hett is a professor of history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and a law degree from the University of Toronto. He's the author of six books on German and European history and the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a speaker for a non-partisan initiative called "Democracy First," which draws on prominent historians (among them Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Heather Cox Richardson) to speak in swing states on the threats to American democracy.