About the Editors

Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor is a specialist in early American and women’s history. Her research centers on the social and cultural history of economic life in 18th- and 19th-century America. She investigates how people used and thought about cash, credit, goods and exchange on a daily basis, with a particular focus on how women negotiated economies in early America. Recently, her scholarship has explored how gender shaped the development of capitalism in the United States. The author of The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (UPenn Press, 2009), and co-author of Global Americans (Cengage, 2017), she is currently completing America Under the Hammer, a study of auctions and market culture.

Lisa G. Materson is a historian of U.S. women’s and gender history. Her work is focused on women’s involvement in social and political justice movements in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her book For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932 (UNC Press, 2009) analyzes African American women’s turn to the party system at the local and national levels to undermine institutionalized segregation and disfranchisement. Her current research explores women’s involvement in the movement for Puerto Rico’s independence from the U.S. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled, American Nationalist: Ruth Reynolds and the Struggle Against U.S. Colonialism in Puerto Rico, which combines a feminist biography of Ruth Reynolds (1916-1989) with a microhistory of her multiple activist communities to examine the gendered and transnational history of the Puerto Rican independence movement.