Kate Masur

Kate Masur is an associate professor of history and a faculty affiliate of the department of African American studies at Northwestern University. Her work explores the intersections of law, politics, and everyday life, with particular emphasis on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery in both the North and South. She is the author of An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (2010), winner of the OAH Avery O. Craven Award, and a coeditor, with Gregory P. Downs, of The World the Civil War Made (2015). She has been commissioned, with Downs, to write a national historic landmark theme study of the Reconstruction era for the National Park Service. She is also a coeditor of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867, series 3, vol. 2: Land and Labor, 1866-1867 (2013). Her writing has also appeared in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her work has been supported by the ACLS/Ryskamp Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. From 2002 to 2004 she was an associate editor at the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland and she is currently an associate editor of the Journal of the Civil War Era. Her current research focuses on race, liberty, and policing in the United States from the early national period through the Civil War.

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