Rate My Professor Marcy Sacks

Marcy Sacks is the Julian S. Rammelkamp Endowed Professor of History at Albion College, where she has served on the faculty since 1999. She previously held the John S. Ludington Endowed Professorship and served three years as associate director of the Gerald R. Ford Institute for Public Policy and Service. She currently chairs the History Department. Sacks earned a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1991, an M.A. in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 1993, and a Ph.D. in History from Berkeley in 1999. Nationally recognized for her scholarship on African American and Civil War history, she teaches courses including U.S. History to the Civil War, African American History to the Civil War, African American History from 1865 to the present, the Civil War and Reconstruction, U.S. Immigration History, and Road to Revolution.

Sacks is the author of two books: Joe Louis: Sports and Race in Twentieth Century America (Routledge, 2018), funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City Before World War I (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). Her key publications include the award-winning article “ ‘I Shall Forward to You My Contraband’: Tracing Wartime Black Movement North Through an Incomplete Archive” (Civil War History, December 2024), which received the 2025 John T. Hubbell Prize for the best article in the journal; “ ‘They Are Truly Marvelous Cats’: The Importance of Companion Animals to U.S. Soldiers during the Civil War” (Journal of the Civil War Era, June 2021); and “Speaking Through Silence? Whites’ Efforts to Make Meaning of Joe Louis” in Cultures of Boxing (Peter Lang, 2015). She has received a Residency Research Fellowship at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Historical Studies (2006-2007), Albion College’s Faculty Diversity Award (2003), and multiple faculty development grants. Sacks’ public scholarship includes blog posts on the history of policing in New York City, a presentation at Lincoln Center on San Juan Hill, contributions to a documentary on the neighborhood, and a workshop for teachers at New York City’s Tenement Museum. Her current book projects are “There is Nothing Like Having a Slave: White Union Soldiers’ Racial Fantasies during the U.S. Civil War” and “The Other Side of Reconstruction: Black Northerners Confront the Aftermath of Southern Emancipation.”