Margaret Boone Dale Women and War Graduate Fellowship

Photo from left-to-right: Beverly Dale, Margaret Boone Dale, Lt. Col. John H. Dale, Sr.  

The Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship for the study of Women and War was established by the Dale family in 2014 in memory of the family matriarch, Margaret Boone Dale.  The fellowship supports the research of a war and society graduate student working on a project that addresses issues examining women in war, families in war, or war and gender.  Fellowship recipients are selected by the Faculty Fellows of the Dale Center.

Fellowship Recipients:

2026 Sarah Anne Hogue (PhD Candidate)

The Margaret Boone Dale Women and War Fellowship will allow PhD candidate Sarah Anne Hogue, who is working under the direction of Dr. Kyle Zelner, to complete research at the Massachusetts Historical Society (she is also the recipient of the MHS's “Society of Colonial Wars Fellowship” for 2026-2027).  Sarah will use Margaret Boone Dale fellowship funds to partially pay for a research trip to the MHS archives in Boston, where she  research women’s papers, focusing on family collections, business records, and tavern licensing records to complete the final phase of her dissertation on Women and War in Early America, 1636-1786.  Researching in these collections will allow Sarah to research individual divorcees and war widows to examine how warfare allowed women to market goods and services to the military, access expanded legal rights through access to divorce, and create new economic opportunities for their families and communities in times of crisis. Sarah’s research specifically analyzes how wartime allowed women to access expanded social and legal rights in colonial and revolutionary New England, focusing on the ways that women negotiated expanded economic power by leveraging their wartime sacrifice. 

 

2022   Lindsey Peterson (PhD Candidate)

The Margaret Boone Dale Women and War Graduate Fellowship allowed PhD Candidate Lindsey Peterson to travel to the Library of Congress, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Arizona State Historical Society, and four other Arizona university archives and special collections to complete the final phase of her dissertation. Thanks to the fellowship’s funding, she also presented her research at the Society for Civil War Historians conference in Philadelphia, where she was awarded the Outstanding Paper by a Graduate Student award. Her paper, entitled “Distinguish[ing] Mankind from the Brute Creation”: How Western Union Veterans used Commemorative Rituals to Bolster Settler Colonialism,” argues Indigenous women used their membership in Civil War commemorative associations to advance tribal sovereignty.  Lindsey is working under the direction of Dr. Susannah J. Ural.

 

2019-2021   Lucas Somers (PhD candidate)

Lucas R. Somers, working under the supervision of Dr. Susannah J. Ural, is using his Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship to fund several research trips to study archival sources and primary documents about several communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the years directly after the American Civil War. Lucas will visit the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and the Kentucky Historical Society’s Military Records and Research Branch in Frankfort, as well as the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky; the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, the Williamson County Archives in Franklin, Tennessee; and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. Somers’s dissertation research focuses on how military occupation and the Freedman’s Bureau affected schools for newly-freed African Americans in the post-war period. These issues ultimately helped shape Reconstruction in Upper-South states. The research is focused in large part on the white and black women, especially teachers, mothers, and interested observers. Lucas’s research analyzes how local processes of military occupation and emancipation reveal more about the postwar period than the traditional political framework of Reconstruction often employed by historians.

 

2015   Lindsey R. Peterson (PhD candidate) 

Lindsey R. Peterson is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi working under the supervision of Dr. Susannah J. Ural.  Lindsey used the inaugural Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship from the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society to access online newspaper databases and obtain Civil War women's auxiliary organizations’ annual convention journals from 1883–1939 in the twelve trans-Mississippi states. This research will contribute to her dissertation, which examines how Union men and women in the trans-Mississippi commemorated the American Civil War. Focused on the Woman’s Relief Corps, Daughters of Union Veterans, and Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, Lindsey's research analyzes how gendered and regional Civil War memory developed in spaces that served as frontiers, not battle fronts, during the war and have been understudied in the historic literature.