Martha Hodes

Princeton University, PhD 1991, MA 1987

Harvard University, MA, 1984 

Bowdoin College, BA, 1980

19th-century United States; race; Civil War and Reconstruction; gender; craft of historical writing; history and memory

(Selected)

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library; Harvard University, Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History; Massachusetts Historical Society-National Endowment for the Humanities; Fulbright Scholar, Germany; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; National Endowment for the Humanities; American Council of Learned Societies; Whiting Foundation; Society of American Historians, elected lifetime member.

Mourning Lincoln

Lincoln Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Avery O. Craven Award, Organization of American Historians; National Book Award longlist finalist; Editor’s Choice, Sunday New York Times Book Review; Best Civil War Books of 2015, Civil War Monitor; Best Books of 2015, Wall Street Journal

The Sea Captain's Wife: A True Story of Love, Race, and War in the Nineteenth Century

Finalist, Lincoln Book Prize, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; Best Books of 2006, Library Journal

White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in the Nineteenth-Century South

Allan Nevins Prize for Literary Distinction in the Writing of History, Society of American Historians; Honorable Mention, Outstanding Book, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights

(Selected)

“Utter Confusion and Contradiction: Franz Boas and the Problem of Human Complexion,” in Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas, ed. Ned Blackhawk and Isaiah Wilner (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 185-208.

“Lincoln’s Black Mourners: Submerged Voices, Everyday Life, and the Question of Storytelling,” in roundtable on “Archives and Methods in the Study of Slavery and Freedom,” Social Text 125 (December 2015), 68-76.

"The Power of Indifference: Violence, Visibility, and Invisibility in the New York City Race Riot of 1900," in Violence and Visibility in Modern History, ed. Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier (New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013), 73-90.

"Knowledge and Indifference in the New York City Race Riot of 1900: An Argument in Search of a Story," Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice 15 (March 2011): 61-89.

"A Story With an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain’s Wife," in Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-Present, ed. Desley Deacon, Penny Russell, Angela Woollacott (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 15-26.

"Experimental History in the Classroom," Perspectives: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association 45 (May 2007): 38-40.

"Fractions and Fictions in the United States Census of 1890," in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 240-70.

"Four Episodes in Re-Creating a Life," Rethinking History: The Journal of Theory and Practice, 10 (June 2006): 277-90.

"The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race: A Transnational Family Story," American Historical Review 108 (Feb. 2003): 84-118.

(Selected)

“Why Some White Americans See Racial Equality as Oppression: White Victimhood’s Roots in the Civil War,” Made By History column, Washington Post, August 27, 2018.

“What Lincoln Left Behind,” New York Times op-ed, April 14, 2015.

“How Abraham Lincoln Said that Black Lives Matter,” Los Angeles Times op-ed, Sunday, March 1, 2015.

“A Nation United in Mourning Lincoln? Think Again,” interview, Boston Globe, Sunday, February 22, 2015.

“‘They have killed our good president’: Remembering the Horror of the Lincoln Assassination,” Salon.com, February 16, 2015.

PBS News Hour, “How America Moved on in the Days After the Civil War,” 2015

Public Radio interviews:

“Diane Rehm Show,” Washington, D.C., American University Public Radio

“Radio Times,” Philadelphia Public Radio

“Backstory,” Virginia Foundation for the Humanities Public Radio

“State of Things,” North Carolina Public Radio

“On Second Thought,” Georgia Public Radio

“Midday,” Baltimore Public Radio

“Kathleen Dunn Show,” Wisconsin Public Radio

“Word of Mouth,” New Hampshire Public Radio

“Front Porch,” New Hampshire Public Radio

“Perspectives,” El Paso Public Radio

“Book Show,” Northeast Public Radio

“Nightwaves,” BBC-London

“Late Night Live,” Australian BBC

Vetenskapsradion Historia, Swedish Public Radio