Personal Statement:
I have sought in my work to integrate social history and women’s history with political and military history. My first book was on white women’s participation and complicity in Southern politics during the antebellum era. My recent book is a bio of Elizabeth Van Lew, a Civil War spy for the Union and pioneering advocate of women’s rights and of civil rights for African Americans. My current project is a study of the origins of the Civil War (part of a multi-author thirteen part series on the war), and seeks to integrate the rich new social history of sectionalism (particularly works on African American and women’s history) with the more traditional political narrative.

Representative Publications:
Southern Lady, Yankee Spy: The True Story of Elizabeth Van Lew, A Union Agent in the Heart of the Confederacy. Oxford University Press, Fall 2003.
Winner of the People’s Choice Award for Non-Fiction, sponsored by the James River
Writers’ Festival and Library of Virginia, Fall 2004
Chosen as “Honor Book,” Library of Virginia Literary Awards, Fall 2004
Winner of the Richard Slatten Award for Excellence in Virginia Biography, Virginia Historical Society, 2004
Featured on C-SPAN’s Book-TV, October 12, 2003
Received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Library Journal
Reviewed in Washington Post Book World
Featured in “Best Books of 2003” articles in Richmond Times-Dispatch and Raleigh News & Observer
Book of the Month Club Alternate Selection
History Book Club and Military History Book Club Selection 

We Mean to be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Book in progress:

The Origins of the American Civil War (tentative title). Volume I of series "Littlefield History of the Civil War Era." Littlefield Fund for Southern History and University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming, 2009.

Articles and Book Chapters:

"True to the Flag: Uncovering the Story of Elizabeth Van Lew and the Richmond Underground," North & South, Fall 2003.

"Patriotism, Partisanship, and Prejudice: Elizabeth Van Lew of Richmond and Debates over Female Civic Duty in Post-Civil War America," in Women and the Unstable State in Nineteenth-Century America. eds. Alison Parker and Stephanie Cole. College Station: Texas A&M Press, 2000, pp. 113-138. 

"Evangelical Womanhood and the Politics of the African Colonization Movement in Antebellum Virginia," in Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, eds. John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999, pp. 169-95. 

"Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia," Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), pp. 494-521.

Anthologized in: Mary Beth Norton and Ruth M. Alexander, eds., Major Problems in American Women’s History. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003, pp. 115-24.

With Susan Poser, co-author. "United States v. Steinmetz: The Legal Legacy of the Civil War, Revisited," Alabama Law Review 46 (Spring 1995), pp. 725-62.

"'The Ladies Are Whigs': Lucy Barbour, Henry Clay, and Nineteenth-Century Virginia Politics," Virginia Cavalcade 42 (Autumn 1992), pp. 72-83.

Anthologized in Kevin R. Hardwick and Warren R. Hofstra, Virginia Reconsidered: New Histories of the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003.