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About Me

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a historian of the 19th century United States who specializes in in American women’s history. Her first book, The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, was published in 2013 and was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2014. She has written about a variety of 19th century topics and is now at work on a book-length project about the memory of the Civil War in Illinois. 

She teaches the US survey, American women’s history, history of gender & sexuality, Civil War history, and social studies teaching methods, and she serves as coordinator for Social Science Teaching. She also serves on the Illinois Civic Mission Coalition and is a consultant on the Guardians of American Democracy Constitutional Democracy as Content and Practice micro-credentialing course for K-12 teachers. 

Recent Publications

• “Using the Past to Better Understand the Present: Contextualizing Today’s History Wars, for Ourselves and for Our Students,” The Councilor (forthcoming, 2026)
• “The Lincolns as Parents,” Blackwell Companion on Lincoln, Evan Rothera et al. (forthcoming, 2026)
• Teaching the Civil War: Disrupting the Conventional Antislavery Narrative and Engaging Students in Visual Analysis, Muster: How the Past Informs the Present, Blog, Journal of the Civil War Era, November 26, 2024
• (with Sace Elder), “Redesigning for Justice: Rethinking Our Curriculum and Expanding the Purposes of History Education,” Journal of American History 110 (March 2024), 729-738
• “Having It All: Lucy Stone, Motherhood, and the Woman’s Rights Movement, 1851-1893,” Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 25 (March 2021)
• Is Justice Blind? An Inquiry Design Model Unit for High School Civics, Illinois Civics Hub, May 2020
• “Confronting the Disconnect in Student Understanding of the Causes of the Civil War,” in Teaching the Causes of the American Civil War, Mike Karpyn et al. (Peter Lang, 2020)
• We Shouldn’t Talk about Voting without Talking about Voter Suppression: Complicating the Ideal of One Person, One Vote, Illinois Civics Hub, February 2020
• Rethinking the ‘Both Sides’ Reflex, Illinois Civics Hub, January 28, 2020
• The Fate of Confederate Monuments in New Orleans, Illinois Civics Hub (2019)
• “Women’s Rights and Gender Ideology, 1848-1890,” The Routledge History of Nineteenth Century America, Jonathan Wells (Routledge, 2018)
• “‘How John Brown Smashed the Whisky Barrel’: John Brown’s Children in Southern California and Memory of the American Civil War,” California History 92 (Fall 2015), 16-36
• The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown’s Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism (Cornell University Press, 2013)

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Country Focus

United States

Expertise by Geography

United States

Expertise by Chronology

19th century

Expertise by Topic

American Civil War, Pedagogy, Women