Elizabeth D. Leonard

• 1. Introduction

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  Elizabeth D. Leonard once appeared in a C-SPAN special about the history of Augusta, Maine. It was an unexpected pairing, since her scholarly work centers on the American Civil War, not one New England town. Leonard is an American historian and a professor at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. Her specialty is the Civil War era, viewed through the lives of American women.

  What led a Civil War specialist into a documentary about a Maine town? And what have decades of research on women, gender, and the war era actually turned up? The answers run through a doctorate earned in California and a long teaching career in Maine. They also run through a shelf of books that keep returning to people history nearly forgot.

• 2. Riverside To Waterville

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  In 1988, Leonard earned a master's degree in U.S. History, followed by a PhD in 1992. Both degrees came from the University of California Riverside. She joined Colby College right after completing her doctorate. There, she served first as an assistant professor and then as an associate professor from 1992 to 2003.

  Leonard now holds the title of John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History, Emerita, at Colby College. That title marks her shift from active teaching into retired faculty status. It set the stage for a research agenda built around a single recurring question: whose stories the Civil War era left out.

• 3. Reading Gender Into War

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  Leonard has weighed in on Loreta Janeta Velázquez, a controversial figure in Civil War history. Velázquez's case shows how gender history can reshape assumptions about the war. Leonard's research interests focus on the conflict viewed through gender as well as race. She examines how these categories shaped both the war itself and the way it has been remembered since.

  During the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, Leonard defended the scope of her scholarship. She argued that prominent figures from the era remained little known, despite the war's outsized place in American memory. That argument about overlooked figures would find its clearest expression in a series of books published across nearly three decades.

• 4. A Shelf Of Books

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  Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War, published by W.W. Norton on the 17th of September 1995, was Leonard's first book. All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies followed from the same publisher on the 1st of June 1999. Lincoln's Avengers: Justice, Revenge, and Reunion After the Civil War appeared in March 2004. Men of Color to Arms!: Black Soldiers, Indian Wars, and the Quest for Equality followed on the 23rd of August 2010.

  Lincoln's Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky is part of the Civil War America series. It came out on the 10th of October 2011, from the University of North Carolina Press. It won the Lincoln Prize in 2012. Between 2000 and 2003, Leonard had also held the Harriet S. and George C. Wiswell Jr. Research Fellowship in American History at Colby College. Her most recent book, Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2022. Benjamin Franklin Butler, the noisy and fearless subject of that 2022 book, remains the newest name on a list Leonard keeps adding to.