Cahill's Latest Book Highlights Hidden Histories of the Women's Suffrage Movement

Cathleen Cahill's second book,  Recasting the Vote: How Women of Color Transformed the Women's Suffrage Movement will be published in November by the University of North Carolina Press (see "Publications" below). Commemorating the centennial of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the book tells the stories of six women of color who fought for the right to vote and for a more inclusive women's rights movement. 

In an interview with Richards Center managing director Matt Isham, Cahill discussed the diversity of the suffrage movement, its international scope, and its intimate connections to broader civil rights movements. "These women weren’t all necessarily searching for the same goals," she explained. "Hispanas in New Mexico were really concerned about Spanish language rights, religious freedom, and land rights. They wanted the vote to shore up their political power and protect those rights. Indigenous women wanted the vote to have a say in federal Indian policy, particularly to protect the sovereignty of their nations and ensure that treaties were upheld.” Linking these efforts to African American women's opposition to Jim Crow laws and Chinese American women's campaigns for immigration reform, Cahill recasts suffrage as an intrinsically multicultural movement that extended far beyond the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Watch Cahill's interview.

Richards Center Affiliated Faculty Take Part in Documentary on Democracy

In September, Richards Center affiliated faculty appeared in the WPSU-TV documentary,  Who Counts: The Complexities of Democracy in  America. Center director Rachel Shelden; Lori Ginzberg, professor of history and women's studies; and Cathleen Cahill, associate professor of history, joined other Penn State faculty to discuss the history of, and contemporary issues affecting, American democracy. Matthew Jordan, associate professor of media studies, produced the documentary for  HumIn Focus, an initiative of Penn State's Humanities Institute.

Graduate Student News

Rick Daily, a doctoral candidate in history and African American studies, earned a highly selective predoctoral fellowship for the  2020–21 academic year in Penn State's Center for Humanities and Information. During his fellowship, he will continue researching his dissertation project, exploring the lived experience, incarceration, and networks of information and care developed during the Black Gay Cultural Renaissance of the mid- to late-twentieth century.

Doctoral candidate Heather Walser was selected as a  2020–21 dissertation Fellow in the Tracy and Ted McCourtney Institute's Center for Democratic Deliberation. Her dissertation project, “Amnesty’s Origins: Federal Power, Peace, and the Public Good in the Long Civil War Era,” examines how Americans understood and used amnesty—or the pardon and oblivion of past acts granted by a government—to resolve conflict, negotiate the meaning of “public good,” and shape the development of the nation-state across the long nineteenth century.

Cecily Zander has become a contributor to Emerging Civil War, a blog featuring the writings of leading scholars in the field of Civil War Era studies. Zander is a doctoral candidate in history and expects to defend her dissertation in 2021. Learn more about Zander and her scholarship in Emerging Civil War's September newsletter.

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