Since 2000 Andrea Sachs has taught high school juniors and seniors at St. Paul Academy and Summit School in Minnesota, offering American history courses ranging from the introductory survey to seminars on historiography, U.S. women's history, U.S. social movements, and the history of medicine. Her interest in feminist social welfare history, as well as the welfare reform debates of the 1990s, informed her dissertation, "The Politics of Poverty: Race, Class, Motherhood, and the National Welfare Rights Organization, 1965â1975." From 2013 to 2016 Sachs served as the first Kâ12 teacher elected to the OAH executive board.
This lecture examines the persistence of mythologized versions of American families during the postwar era. It looks at the ways nostalgic renditions of postwar families offered a distorted but persistent "memory" of these families.