Linda Gordon

Linda Gordon is a historian specializing in 20th-century U.S. social policy, gender history, and documentary photography. Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts from Swarthmore College and earned a Master of Arts and doctorate in Russian history from Yale University before focusing her research on women and gender in the United States. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History and University Professor of the Humanities at New York University, where she has taught courses on historical methods, gender, comparative social movements, imperialism, and 20th-century American history. Gordon has also taught at University of Massachusetts Boston and University of Wisconsin Madison.

Gordon's early scholarship contributed significantly to the history of social policy and gender. Her book, "Woman's Body, Woman's Right: The History of Birth Control Politics in America," later revised and reissued as "The Moral Property of Women," is recognized as a comprehensive history of birth-control politics in the United States. She is also the author of "Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence," which received the Joan Kelly Prize of the American Historical Association, and "Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare," which was awarded the Berkshire Prize and the Gustavus Myers Human Rights Award. Gordon has served on the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services Advisory Council on Violence Against Women.

Gordon's later work explores narrative history and biography. Her book, "The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction," which examines a vigilante action against Mexican Americans, received the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize for best book on the history of the Western Hemisphere. "Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits," a biography of the Depression-era documentary photographer, earned Gordon a second Bancroft Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography, the National Arts Club prize for arts writing, and the WILLA Literary Award. During her research for the Lange biography, Gordon discovered a significant group of Lange's photographs documenting the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. These images, commissioned by the U.S. Army and later impounded, were published in "Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment," with introductory essays co-written with historian Gary Okihiro.

Gordon's scholarship also includes "The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition," which analyzes the northern branch of the Klan as a mass movement, and "Inge Morath: Magnum Legacy — An Illustrated Biography," a portrait of one of the first women to join the Magnum photography collective. Her book, "Seven Social Movements That Changed America," examines the impact of grassroots activism on American democracy, covering movements from the settlement house movement of the 1890s to the women's liberation movement of the 1970s. Throughout her career, Gordon has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and the New York Public Library's Cullman Center.