Rate My Professor Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz

Bonnie Laughlin-Schultz is a Professor of History and Coordinator of History with Teacher Licensure in Social Science at Eastern Illinois University. She earned her PhD from Indiana University in 2009. She is a historian of the nineteenth-century United States who specializes in American women's history and the broad Civil War era. Her first book, The Tie That Bound Us: The Women of John Brown's Family and the Legacy of Radical Abolitionism, published by Cornell University Press in 2013, was named a Kansas Notable Book in 2014. The book details the involvement of the women in John Brown's family in radical abolitionism and traces their legacy through subsequent generations.

Laughlin-Schultz teaches the U.S. history survey, American women's history, Civil War era history, social studies teaching methods, and historical research and writing. She serves as a Civics Instructional Coach for the McCormick Foundation, assisting middle-level and secondary civics teachers in downstate Illinois, and writes about civics topics for IllinoisCivics.org. Her research interests include history education and civics education. Key publications feature the co-authored article "Redesigning for Justice: Rethinking Our Curriculum and Expanding the Purposes of History Education" with Sace E. Elder in The Journal of American History (2024); "Teaching the Civil War: Disrupting the Conventional Antislavery Narrative and Engaging Students in Visual Analysis" in Journal of the Civil War Era (2024); "Teaching and Doing History in Historic Times" in The Councilor (2021); book reviews in Journal of Southern History (2020), The Journal of American History (2020), Reviews in American History (2019), and The American Historical Review (2019); and chapters "Epilogue: The Last Echo from John Brown’s Grave" and "Introduction: Searching for the Brown Women" (2017). She also represents Unit A for EIU-UPI.