Background

Carol Sheriff specializes in nineteenth-century social and cultural history, with an emphasis on the period from 1815-1865. She received her Ph.D. from Yale University in 1993, and her first book, The Artificial River, The Erie Canal and the Paradoxes of Progress, 1817-1862 (Hill and Wang, 1996), won the Dixon Ryan Fox Prize from the New York State Historical Association.  With Scott Nelson, she is the author of A People at War: Civilians and Soldiers in America's Civil War, 1854-1877 (Oxford University Press, 2007).  She is currently authoring four chapters of Mary Beth Norton, et al.,  A People and A Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2008).