Leigh K. Fought, Ph.D.

The 1970s brought the American Bicentennial, the miniseries Roots, and the TV series Little House on the Prairie. My grandparents also took me to colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, and more than one Civil War battlefield. This odd mix of patriotism, race, women’s history, and living history profoundly affected me as a little white girl growing up in the South. I discovered that there were many different pasts and their stories conflict with and complement one another, fascinating me and dooming me from an early age to become a historian. The media of history in which I have worked has varied from documents editor, to archivist, to living history museum interpreter all in the process of finding my purpose in the academic world of teaching, research, and writing. I have a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Houston and a Master of Library Science degree from Simmons College in Boston. If you want to find my work in print, look for Southern Womanhood and Slavery: A Biography of Louisa S. McCord (University of Missouri Press, 2003), who was not only a planter but a pro­slavery and anti­-woman’s rights essayist. If you prefer something lighter, shorter and with more pictures, try Mystic, Connecticut: From Pequot Village to Tourist Town (The History Press, 2006). I was also an editor of the first volume of Frederick Douglass’s Correspondence (Yale University Press, 2009). Ask me about him and you will probably learn more than you thought possible about Douglass and women, the subject of my recent book, Women in the World of Frederick Douglass (Oxford University Press, 2017).