American Rambler With Colin Woodward

A native of Northern Ireland, Stephanie McCurry moved to Canada while in high school before settling in the United States. She studied under renowned slavery scholars Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese as a grad student. She made a big splash with her first, prize-winning book, Masters of Small Worlds, which wove together politics, gender, and class relations in antebellum South Carolina. Her second book, Confederate Reckoning, published in 2010, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Now she has a new book, Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War. Despite her success, Dr. McCurry is honest about the challenges she has faced. She talks about her rough road to settling in America, the often thorny nature of grad school politics, and producing scholarship amid changing jobs, moving across the country, and raising children. Through it all, she has focused on the role of women in 19th century American history and how she has tried to raise (and answer) new questions about the past.