Leslie A. Schwalm is a social historian of nineteenth-century America.  She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1991.  She teaches courses on American slavery, the Civil War, emancipation and Reconstruction, all with a particular emphasis on women's history and African American history.  She holds joint appointments in both Women's Studies and African American Studies.  Leslie received the May Brodbeck Humanities Fellowship and Faculty Scholar Award from the University of Iowa and has been awarded fellowships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Iowa State Historical Society.

Leslie's book, A Hard Fight For We: Women's Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina (1997), is a study of African American women on the rice plantations in the South Carolina low country. Leslie explores how African American women, at the point when slavery was disintegrating, struggled to control their own labor, resist slaveowners' demands, and also fought for respect within their own households. The book was awarded the Willie Lee Rose Prize by the Southern Association of Women's Historians in 1998.   Leslie also won, in 1998, the Letitia Woods Brown Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians for her article "Sweet Dreams of Freedom: Freedwomen's Reconstruction of Life and Labor in Lowcountry South Carolina."

Leslie's current research explores the meaning, impact, and public memory of emancipation. She is currently working on a book, titled Emancipation's Diaspora, which explores the ways in which the destruction of slavery became a national phenomenon, as opposed to a southern one.  She has published two articles related to her research on this project.  "Emancipation Day Celebrations: The Commemoration of Slavery and Freedom in Iowa," was awarded the Iowa State Historical Society's Throne-Aldrich Certificate of Recognition.  "'Overrun With Free Negroes?: Emancipation and Wartime Migration in the Upper Midwest," was selected by the Organization of American Historians for inclusion in Best Articles in American History (Palgrave Press, 2006).

Out of this line of research, Leslie is also completing a collection of primary sources documenting how African Americans in Iowa experienced and understood the end of slavery.  This work will be the most comprehensive collection of material ever published on African Americans in nineteenth-century Iowa. 

Additionally, Leslie serves as an advisory editor to the "Blacks in the Diaspora" series of the Indiana University Press.


Courses taught:

16A:171/131:171 : Women in America Colonial Period to 1870
16:205/131:206 : Gender & Race in the Nineteenth Century U.S.
16:287/131:287 : Readings in African American Women's History

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