Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

About Me: Rebecca Brenner Graham is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, where she coordinates Brown 2026, manages an oral history project about the bicentennial, and teaches a first-year seminar called American Revolution in Popular Culture. She is writing a book on the same topic as the class, including American Girl dolls, Liberty’s Kids, and Hamilton.

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 taken her to over forty book talks in seventeen states. 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 teacher at the Madeira School and a lecturer at American University, where she earned her PhD in history in 2021. Her essays and reviews have been published in Smithsonian Magazine, Politico Magazine, Time, Slate, Ms., The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

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

Recent Publications: Politico Magazine (2025), Trump is Waging a Culture War on the Library of Congress. It’s Been Done Before

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