Participant Info
- First Name
- Isabela
- Last Name
- Morales
- Country
- United States
- State
- NJ New Jersey
- risabela.morales@gmail.com
- Affiliation
- Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum
- Website URL
- http://www.risabelamorales.com/
- Keywords
- 19th century, American South, American West, Emancipation, Family, Higher Education, Museums, Public History, Race, Slavery
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- PhD
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
R. Isabela Morales is an award-winning author and public historian based in New Jersey. She is the winner of the 2023 Frederick Douglass Book Prize from Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center, the 2023 Tom Watson Brown Book Award from the Society of Civil War Historians, the 2023 Shapiro Book Prize from the Huntington Library, and the 2023 William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Book Prize from the American Society for Legal History. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, is a multi-generational saga of one mixed-race family in the American West and South from the antebellum period through the rise of Jim Crow.
Dr. Morales is the Education and Exhibit Manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum (SSAAM), central New Jersey’s first Black history museum. She is also the Editor and Project Manager of Princeton University’s expansive public history initiative, The Princeton & Slavery Project. Her research for the project has been featured in The New York Times.
Dr. Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019, specializing in the 19th-century United States, slavery, and emancipation. She completed an M.A. in history from Princeton in 2014 and a B.A. in history and American Studies from The University of Alabama in 2012, where she first began the research that would become Happy Dreams of Liberty.
- Recent Publications
Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022).
“An enslaved family and the question of generational wealth in the United States,” OUPblog, Oxford University Press.
“100-year-old Love Story Uncovered in a Central Jersey Attic,” Giving Voice, Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum.
“A Great Physician Had Help From a Freed Slave,” Princeton Alumni Weekly.
“Jonathan Edwards Jr.,” Princeton & Slavery Project.
“‘The Celebrated Alexander Dumas Watkins’: Princeton’s First Black Instructor,” Princeton & Slavery Project.
“Slavery at the President’s House,” The Princeton & Slavery Project.
“Princeton’s Slaveholding Presidents,” The Princeton & Slavery Project.
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States
- Expertise by Geography
- United States
- Expertise by Chronology
- 18th century, 19th century
- Expertise by Topic
- American Civil War, American Founding Era, Emancipation, Family, Museums, Public History, Race, Slavery
