Jean Baker

Jean Baker is the Bennett-Harwood Professor of History at Goucher College, where she earned her undergraduate degree prior to completing graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University with David Herbert Donald. She has taught primarily at Goucher, with visiting professorships at various institutions including Harvard College. Most recently she taught in Goucher's prison education program in Jessup, Maryland. Her early publications focused on the intersection of politics and the Civil War, including Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (1998), an effort to study politics as more than simply elections. She also coauthored a textbook on the Civil War and Reconstruction and wrote a popular biography of Mary Todd Lincoln. In recent years her research and writing have focused on women's history, including Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists (2005) and Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion (2011). Currently she is writing a biography of the architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe.