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About the Author
About Rebecca Edwards, author of
New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905
I was born on a US Army base in Giessen, West Germany, and grew up in
Smithfield, Virginia in a family of avid readers and travelers. I received a B.A. from the College of William and Mary in 1988 with a major in English, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, where I had the great pleasure of studying with Cindy S. Aron and Edward L. Ayers. I completed my dissertation in 1995. It became my first book, Angels in the Machinery, published by Oxford University Press in 1997. It explored the role of "family values" in partisan campaigns. For many years historians argued that Gilded Age politics was mostly sound and fury: there were no real policy issues of national importance (some textbooks still claim this) and political parties were supposedly for "men only," an arena in which manhood could be expressed and confirmed. In Angels I set out to prove that many women had both policy agendas and strong party loyalties, even before they could vote. I also argued that conflicting "family values" lay at the heart of partisan platforms and arguments. |
For more on how gender arguments influenced policymakers in the late nineteenth century, from the funding of the Freedmen's Bureau to high protective tariffs, see my recent essay in The Democratic Experiment : New Directions in American Political History, published by Princeton University Press and edited by Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer.
| Since 1995 I've taught at Vassar College. My home base is with my wonderful colleagues in the History Department,
where I participate in the introductory course "American
Moments" and offer classes on the 19th-century United
States, women in the United States up to 1890, and the American West. I also teach in Vassar's American Culture and
Environmental Studies programs on such topics as "Gender, Class, and
Region," "Silver and Gold: Money and Culture in
the Gilded Age," and "Grassland: Natural and Human Histories on the
American Plains." Since 1997 I've been working on a biography of Populist orator Mary E. Lease, a fascinating and controversial figure. I've published essays on Lease in The Human Tradition in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, edited by Ballard C. Campbell, and in a collection on famous Kansans, edited by Virgil Dean, forthcoming from University Press of Kansas. The biography, though, is taking longer than I expected. For one thing I stopped to write New Spirits. Also, Lease's career was complex--at various points she was a Prohibitionist, suffragist, labor organizer, Populist, Democrat, and Republican--and she left no personal papers that I can find (yet), so writing about her is a challenge. I live in Poughkeepsie with my husband, Mark Seidl, a freelance editor and writer of historical fiction. (Look for his novel about the Viking Age, which we hope is forthcoming soon. Stay tuned!) Our son Ben--to whom New Spirits is dedicated--recently turned three and likes reading, dancing, and dressing as a pirate. Actually he enjoys almost everything he does, and on most days I'm lucky enough to say the same! |
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