Kathleen M. Brown is an American historian specializing in early American and Atlantic history, the history of comparative race, gender, and sex, and the history of abolition and human rights. She is currently the David Boies Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. [1]
Brown received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. [1] She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015. [2]
Her first book, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, won the American Historical Association's John H. Dunning Prize, while her second book, Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, won the Organization of American Historians' Lawrence W. Levine Award and the Society for the History of the Early American Republic's Best Book prize. [3]
She has been a participating speaker in the Organization of American Historians' Distinguished Lectureship Program. [3]
The history of women in the United States encompasses the lived experiences and contributions of women throughout American history.
Peggy Ann Pascoe was an American historian. She was the Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. She was a member of the University of Oregon History Department from 1996 until her death on July 23, 2010. Prior to her work at UO, Pascoe worked as an assistant professor and then associate professor at the University of Utah, where she taught courses on women’s history, race, and sexuality. Pascoe’s work centers on the history of race, gender, and sexuality, with a particular investment in law and the U.S. West. Together with George Lipsitz, Earl Lewis, George Sanchez, and Dana Takagi, Pascoe edited the influential American Crossroads book series in Ethnic Studies, published by the University of California Press. Pascoe held this position for fifteen years.
Partus sequitur ventrem was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there; the doctrine mandated that children of slave mothers would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery. The legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem was derived from Roman civil law, specifically the portions concerning slavery and personal property (chattels).
Gender history is a sub-field of history and gender studies, which looks at the past from the perspective of gender. It is in many ways, an outgrowth of women's history. The discipline considers in what ways historical events and periodization impact women differently from men. For instance, in an influential article in 1977, "Did Women have a Renaissance?", Joan Kelly questioned whether the notion of a Renaissance was relevant to women. Gender historians are also interested in how gender difference has been perceived and configured at different times and places, usually with the assumption that such differences are socially constructed. These social constructions of gender throughout time are also represented as changes in the expected norms of behavior for those labeled male or female. Those who study gender history note these changes in norms and those performing them over time and interpret what those changes say about the larger social/cultural/political climate.
Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800, is a book written by historian Allan Kulikoff. Published in 1986, it is the first major study that synthesized the historiography of the colonial Chesapeake region of the United States. Tobacco and Slaves is a neo-Marxist study that explains the creation of a racial caste system in the tobacco-growing regions of Maryland and Virginia and the origins of southern slave society. Kulikoff uses statistics compiled from colonial court and church records, tobacco sales, and land surveys to conclude that economic, political, and social developments in the 18th-century Chesapeake established the foundations of economics, politics, and society in the 19th-century South.
Mary Beth Norton is an American historian, specializing in American colonial history and well known for her work on women's history and the Salem witch trials. She is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor Emeritus of American History at the Department of History at Cornell University. Norton served as president of the American Historical Association in 2018. She is a recipient of the Ambassador Book Award in American Studies for In the Devil's Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Norton received her Bachelor of Arts at the University of Michigan (1964). The next year she completed a Master of Arts, going on to receive her Ph. D. in 1969 at Harvard University. She identifies as a Democrat and she considers herself a Methodist. Mary Beth Norton is a pioneer of women historians not only in the United States but also in the whole world, as she was the first woman to get a job in the department of history at Cornell University.
Paula J. Giddings is an American writer, historian, and civil rights activist. She is the author of When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America,In Search of Sisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge of the Black Sorority Movement and Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching.
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (Greenstead) (1630 – January 20, 1665) was one of the first black people of the Thirteen Colonies to sue for freedom from slavery and win. Key won her freedom and that of her infant son John Grinstead on July 21, 1656, in the colony of Virginia. Key based her suit on the fact that her father was an Englishman who had acknowledged her and arranged her baptism as a Christian in the American branch of the Church of England. He was a wealthy planter who had tried to protect her by establishing a guardianship for her when she was young, before his death. Based on these factors, her attorney and common-law husband, William Grinstead, argued successfully that she should be freed. The lawsuit was one of the earliest "freedom suits" by an African-descended person in the English colonies.
Freedom suits were lawsuits in the Thirteen Colonies and the United States filed by slaves against slaveholders to assert claims to freedom, often based on descent from a free maternal ancestor, or time held as a resident in a free state or territory.
Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history and the methods required to do so. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, personal achievement over a period of time, the examination of individual and groups of women of historical significance, and the effect that historical events have had on women. Inherent in the study of women's history is the belief that more traditional recordings of history have minimized or ignored the contributions of women to different fields and the effect that historical events had on women as a whole; in this respect, women's history is often a form of historical revisionism, seeking to challenge or expand the traditional historical consensus.
Asunción Lavrin is a historian and author with more than 100 publications on topics of gender and women's studies in colonial and contemporary Latin America and religion and spirituality in Colonial Mexico. She is professor emerita at Arizona State University. Lavrin is the daughter-in-law of the artist Nora Fry Lavrin. She has two children, Cecilia and Andy, and two grand children, Erik and Nora.
Darlene Clark Hine is an American author and professor in the field of African-American history. She is a recipient of the 2014 National Humanities Medal.
The John H. Dunning Prize is a biennial book prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the best book in history related to the United States. The prize was established in 1929, and is regarded as one of the most prestigious national honors in American historical writing. Currently, only the author's first or second book is eligible. Laureates include Oscar Handlin, John Higham, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and Gordon Wood. The Dunning Prize has been shared five times, most recently in 1993. No award was made in 1937.
Dell Thayer Upton is an architectural historian. He is emeritus professor at the department of art history at University of California, Los Angeles, and Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. He had taught previously at the University of Virginia.
Brenda Elaine Stevenson is an American historian specializing in the history of the Southern United States and African American history, particularly slavery, gender, race and race riots. She is Professor and Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History and Professor in African-American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From Autumn 2021, she will be Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History at St John's College, University of Oxford.
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizes are awarded each year by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Nominees must be women normally resident in North America who have published a book in the previous year. One prize recognizes an author's first book that "deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality", and the other prize recognizes "a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality."
Ruth Sara Feldstein is an American historian with research interests in United States history; her work focuses on 20th-century culture and politics; women's and gender history; and African American history. Currently she is professor of history and American studies at Rutgers University.
Karin A. Wulf is an American historian and the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. Wulf began her tenure as the Director of the Omohundro Institute on July 1, 2013. She is also one of the founders of Women Also Know History, a searchable website database of women historians. Additionally, Wulf worked to spearhead a neurodiversity working group at William & Mary in 2011. She is currently writing a book about genealogy and political culture in Early America titled, Lineage: Genealogy and the Politics of Connection in British America, 1680-1820. Her work examines the history of women, gender, and the family in Early America.
Keisha N. Blain is an American writer and scholar of American and African-American history. She is Professor of Africana Studies and History at Brown University. Blain served as President of the African American Intellectual History Society from 2017 to 2021. Blain is associated with the Charleston Syllabus social media movement.
Lucy Burwell Berkeley was courted by Governor Francis Nicholson when she was 17 years old. When she did not return his affections, the middle-aged Nicholson threatened her family. Burwell Berkeley was among the women of the early 18th century that sought a marriage based upon her feelings of love and affection—for a man of refined manners, good character, and emotional health—over political and financial status. Nicholson had threatened her family and the man that she would marry. Philip Ludwell, a family member, interceded on her behalf and the Virginia Governor's Council asked Anne, Queen of Great Britain to remove Nicholson from his role of governor of the Virginia colony.