Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

About Me: Rebecca Brenner Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, coordinating Brown 2026, a university-wide initiative engaging the fullest histories of the American Revolution and its legacies. She teaches a first-year seminar titled American Revolution in Popular Culture. She is writing a book on the same topic, where the American Girl doll universe meets the 1776 to Liberty’s Kids to Hamilton pipeline.

Rebecca is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, Jan. 2025). Dear Miss Perkins has been positively reviewed in The Wall Street Journal, excerpted in Slate, and profiled in Smithsonian Magazine, among other places. It has taken her to book talks in twelve states and counting. In 2023, Rebecca was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association.

Prior to Brown, Rebecca was a History Teacher at the Madeira School and a Lecturer at American University. She has a PhD in history and MA in public history from American University and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. Her essays and reviews have been published in Time, Slate, Ms., The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Despite being from and living in Rhode Island, she also calls Washington, DC, “home.”

Recent Publications: Time (2025), The 1930s Case That Sparked a Debate About Deportation

Time (2024), Frances Perkins Was the First Woman to Serve in a U.S. Presidential Cabinet. It’s No Coincidence She’s Having a Moment

Time (2023), The Classic Christmas Movie That Offers a Lesson About Antisemitism in America

Slate (2025), Climb Not One Mountain

Slate (2022), Why the Philosophers Libertarians Love Always Come Out Worse for Wear

Ms. (2025), ‘What Do We Call You?’ The Many Names of Frances Perkins

The Washington Post (2023), Pitting religious freedom against Sunday mail goes back to the founding

The Washington Post (2022), Politicians have long courted Jews, even as antisemitism abounds

The Washington Post (2021), Attacking Sunday voting is part of a long tradition of controlling Black Americans

The Washington Post (2019), The woman behind Elizabeth Warren’s blueprint for the presidency

The Washington Post (2019), Women’s colleges should admit trans students. It’s wholly consistent with their mission

The Washington Post (2018), How to stop President Trump’s latest attack on immigrants

Los Angeles Review of Books (2022), French Cigarettes and a Lot of Coffee: On Skye C. Cleary’s ‘How to Be Authentic’

Expertise by Chronology: 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, 21st century