Scholar - Women Also Know History

Participant Info

Keywords: Antebellum and Civil War US, African American history, women's and gender history, political culture, print culture, history of the Midwest, public history

About Me: Brie Swenson Arnold is Associate Professor of History at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where she teaches courses on early America, the Civil War, African American history, US women’s and gender history, and public history. She received her BA in History, English Literature, and French from Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and her MA and PhD in American History from the University of Minnesota. Her research interests center on nineteenth-century race and gender, with particular emphases on the popular print and political cultures of the Civil War era and the migration of African Americans to the Upper Midwest after the Civil War. She has presented many conference papers and posters, including at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Society of Civil War Historians, and the National Council on Public History. In addition to research and teaching, she is an active public historian who collaborates with museums, libraries, schools, and government agencies to develop exhibits, tours, lectures, and historical markers.

Recent Publications: Brie Swenson Arnold, “’To Inflame the Mind of the North’: Slavery Politics and the Sexualized Violence of Bleeding Kansas,” Kansas History: A Journal of the Central Plains 38:1 (Spring 2015), 22-39. Also online at https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2015spring_arnold.pdf. Recipient of 2016 Langsdorf Award of Excellence.

Brie Swenson Arnold, “An Opportunity to Challenge the ‘Color Line’: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Women’s Labor Activism in Late Nineteenth-Century Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” Annals of Iowa, 74: 2 (Spring 2015), 101-141. Also online at https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=12186&context=annals-of-iowa. Recipient of the State Historical Society of Iowa’s 2016 Throne-Aldrich Award and the Midwestern History Association’s 2016 Dorothy Schwieder Prize.