Janet L. Coryell

Janet Coryell has always wondered what women were up to while the men were doing what the textbooks said was "important." She's taught women's history for 30 years, along with courses in the antebellum US and the Civil War era. She prefers editing letters from women in history to writing boring monographs and longs for the day when women are seen as people first. She is the author of Neither Heroine Nor Fool: Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland, a political pamphleteer who tried to tell Lincoln how to run the war, and a co-editor of A Surgeon's Civil War, a set of letters from Daniel Holt, MD, surgeon with the 12st NY. She's edited letters from schoolgirls in the 19th century, a Depression-era farm wife, and two New England teachers living in Virginia. She just finished writing, researching, narrating, and associate-producing a documentary film: A Team of Their Own: the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League for the Veterans History Project at Grand Valley State University and now understands the importance of statistics. (Go Cubs!) Her students at Western Michigan University are why she does much of what she does--they need to know their history so they can see that they are part of a continuum doing important things no matter what a textbook says.