| 1 | Name: | Dr. Linda Gordon | |
| Institution: | New York University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2015 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 303. History Since 1715 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1940 | ||
Linda Gordon was Vilas Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Wisconsin until 1999 and is now University Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at NYU. Her PhD was in Russian history and her dissertation was published as Cossack Rebellions: Social Turmoil in the Ukraine (1983). Turning then to US history, her early books focused on the historical roots of social policy issues, particularly as they concern gender and family issues, including Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control in America (1976), revised edition titled The Moral Property of Women (2002); Heroes of Their Own Lives: The History and Politics of Family Violence; and Pitied But Not Entitled (1988): Single Mothers and the History of Welfare (1994). She then turned to narrative or "microhistory" as a way of illuminating historical developments. Her 1999 book, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction, the story of a vigilante action against Mexican-Americans, won the Bancroft prize for best book in American history and the Beveridge prize for best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere. Her Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits won a second Bancroft prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, and the National Arts Club prize for best arts writing. She discovered (in archives) unnoticed and never published Lange photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, commissioned and then impounded by the US Army because of their critical perspective; she published these in 2006 as Impounded: Dorothea Lange and Japanese Americans in World War II. Most recently she co-authored Feminism Unfinished: A Short, Surprising History of American Women’s Movements (2014) and edited for Aperture Dorothea Lange: Masters of Photography (2014). | |||