Linda Gordon

Professor Emerita of History

Education

PhD, Yale, Russian history

Areas of Research/Interest

U.S. social, political, and social policy history, 19th-20th century; women and gender; right-wing populism; documentary photography; Mexican Americans

Books

  • Inge Morath: A Biography
    Inge Morath: A Biography
  • The Second Coming of the KKK: the Ku Klux Klan and the American Political Tradition
    (2017)
    KKK
  • Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
    W. W. Norton, 2009.
    * Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award for biography * Winner of the Bancroft prize for best book in US history * Winner of the National
    Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits
  • The Moral Property of Women: The History of Birth Control Politics in America
    University of Illinois Press, 2003.
    * This is a completely revised version of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right.
    The Moral Property of Women: The History of Birth Control Politics in America
  • The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
    Harvard University Press, 1999; paperback 2000.
    * Winner of the Bancroft Prize for best book in US history, * Winner of the Beveridge Prize for best book on the history of the Americas * Wi
    The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction
  • Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the Origins of Welfare
    Free Press, 1994; paperback, Harvard University Press, 1995.
    * Winner of the Berkshire Prize for best book in women's history * Winner of the Gustavus Myers Award for best book on human rights in North Amer
    Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the Origins of Welfare
  • Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence
    Viking, 1988; paperback, Penguin, 1989; British edition, 1989.
    * Winner of AHA's Joan Kelly Prize for the best book in women's history or theory * Winner of the Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Book
    Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence
  • Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine.
    SUNY Press, 1983.
    * Winner of the Antonovych Prize for 1983
    Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Sixteenth-Century Ukraine
  • Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America
    Viking, 1976; Penguin paperback, 1977; revised 2nd edition, 1990.
    * Nominated for the National Book Award in History, 1976
    Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America

Edited Books with Scholarly Introductions

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, Norton, 2006.

Dear Sisters: Dispatches from Women's Liberation, with Baxandall, Basic Books, 2000.

America's Working Women:  A Documentary History, with Baxandall and Reverby.  Random House and Vintage, 1976; entirely revised 2nd edition, 1995.

Women, the State, and Welfare:  Historical and Theoretical Essays. University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.   
   * Chicago Women in Publishing Award, First Place.

Selected Articles

Many short pieces on the KKK, available at my website www.lindagordonhistorian.org

Interview with me in Modern American History, vol. 1 #1, March 2018.

Article about my work by John Pettegrew in Journal of Women's History vol. 30 #1

“History Constructs an Historian,” in Becoming Historians, ed. James Banner and John Gillis, University of Chicago Press, 2008. 

“Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist,” Journal of American History 93 #3, December 2006. 

“If the Progressives were Advising Us Today, Should We Listen?” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era, April 2002. 

"A Genealogy of 'Dependency': Tracing a Keyword of the US Welfare State," with Nancy Fraser,  Signs, winter 1994, and in many anthologies. 

"Social Insurance and Public Assistance:  Gender in American Welfare Thought," American Historical Review, February 1992, and in several anthologies. 

"Black and White Visions of Welfare, 1890-1945," Journal of American History, September 1991, and in several anthologies. 

Interview on the craft and theory of history, by Carol Lasser, in Visions of History:  Conversations with Radical Histori¬ans, Pantheon, 1984.