Editor – Masur

KATE MASUR

Kate Masur is Board of Visitors Professor and Professor of History at Northwestern University.

She specializes in the history of the 19th-century United States, focusing on how Americans grappled with questions of race and equality after the abolition of slavery in both the North and South. Masur, a faculty affiliate of the Department of African American Studies, is author most recently of Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021), which won several book prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History. Collaborating with students and staff at Northwestern and with the Colored Conventions Project and #digblack at Penn State, she also produced Black Organizing in Pre-Civil War Illinois: Creating Community, Demanding Justice.

She and Greg Downs co-edited The World the Civil War Made (2015), a collection of essays that charts new directions in the study of the post-Civil War Era. The two also co-authored The Era of Reconstruction, 1861-1900, a National Historic Landmark Theme Study published in July 2017. Downs and Masur wrote about their NPS work in The Atlantic Online and The New York Times, and they co-edited a Reconstruction special issue of The Journal of the Civil War Era that includes a forum on the future of Reconstruction studies and a roundtable conversation on Reconstruction in public history and memory.