Dr. Debra A. Reid dareid@eiu.edu

Research Interests/Teaching Fields
Collections management, material culture, and 19th and 20th century U. S. social and political history.

Current Projects

Dr. Reid focuses on rural and minority studies. Her dissertation, “Reaping a Greater Harvest: African Americans, Agrarian Reform, and the Texas Agricultural Extension Service,” received the Agricultural History Society’s Gilbert C. Fite Dissertation Award (2001), and the manuscript is under contract at Texas A&M University Press. She publishes regularly on historic site interpretation, contributed a chapter to The Countryside in the Age of the Modern State: Political Histories of Rural America (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Interpreting Historic House Museums (AltaMira Press, 2002), and has published articles and book reviews in various journals and anthologies, including Agricultural History, Rural History, and Tennessee Historical Quarterly. Her current projects include a book manuscript on "The Political Meanings of African American Farm and Property Ownership", researching material culture changes among Anabaptists in the rural Midwest from the 1810s to the present, and analyzing historic domestic interior re-interpretation.

Courses (Past and Present)
HIS 2010-G: History of the United States to 1877
HIS 2020-G: History of the United States from 1877
HIS 2090-G: History of the United States from 1877 (Honors)
HIS 3600: The U.S. Constitution and the Nation
HIS 4910: The Foundation of the American Constitutional and Political System
HIS 5090: Care and Management of Historical Artifacts
HIS 5330: Material Life in America, 1600-Present