Rebecca Edwards

On leave, 2024 and 2025

Rebecca Edwards received her PhD in 1995 from the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on the post-Civil War era and include electoral politics and the history of women and gender. She teaches courses on the 19th-century United States, women in the United States up to 1890, and the American West, including a First-Year Writing Seminar. Professor Edwards is the author of Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (Oxford University Press, 1997) and New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2010). She is co-author, with James A. Henretta and Robert O. Self, of America’s History, 7th edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2011). Recent publications include “Women’s and Gender History” in American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Temple University Press and the American Historical Association, 2011).

Professor Edwards is currently working on an article about US politics in the 1880s and a collection of documents on the march of Jacob Coxey’s army of the unemployed in 1894. She is beginning research for a project about the significance of women’s economic and reproductive roles in US political development.