Joan Waugh

• 1. Introduction

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  Joan Waugh has built an academic career around one of American history's most contested figures: Ulysses Grant. She is an American historian who studies the Civil War, its aftermath, and the Gilded Age. She teaches nineteenth-century American history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Waugh earned her own degree from UCLA before returning to the same campus as a member of its faculty. Her writing ranges from full length books to shorter essays. One figure keeps recurring in both: Grant, whom she treats with more sympathy than his reputation has often received. What has she actually argued in those books, and where has that argument traveled beyond the printed page?

• 2. Four Books On An Era

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  U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth carries Waugh's argument in its own title, that his reputation rests on more than legend. In 1998 she published Unsentimental Reformer: The Life of Josephine Shaw Lowell, a study of a Gilded Age reform figure. The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture followed in 2004, examining how the war was remembered rather than how it was fought.

  By 2015 Waugh had turned to a broader canvas, co-writing The American War: A History of the Civil War Era with historian Gary W. Gallagher. Four books, stretching from a single reformer's life to an entire era, share her recurring focus on memory and reputation. That same Gallagher would soon share a stage with Waugh, far from the page.

• 3. Taking It Public

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  Gary W. Gallagher shows up again once the books close, this time behind conference programs at the Huntington Library. Waugh has organized Civil War conferences there together with Gallagher, moving their shared interest from print into public rooms. She has given numerous lectures at universities, carrying her research directly to audiences outside her own classroom. Each Huntington Library conference keeps testing that reading of Grant in front of new audiences, long after any of Waugh's four books first reached shelves.