Janann M. Sherman

Professor

Chair of the Department

Office: 219 Mitchell
Telephone: 901.678.2515
Fax: 901.678.2720
E-mail: sherman@memphis.edu
Webpage: http://cassian.memphis.edu/history/sherman/
Education: Ph.D., History, Rutgers University, 1993
CV: http://cassian.memphis.edu/history/sherman/CVcurrent.html

Fields of interest

20^th-Century American Political and Social History; Post-1945 America; Women’s History; The Cold War

My research focuses, for the most part, on American women in the 20^th century, particularly with respect to their relationships to politics. My first book, The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage, examined the story of the achievement of the 19^th Amendment on the national level and the final battle in Tennessee to secure the 36^th ratification of the amendment to make it law. My second book, which was also my dissertation, is a biography of Senator Margaret Chase Smith of Maine, who served 33 years in the U.S. Congress, 24 of them as the sole woman in the U.S. Senate. Her life was the perfect device with which to examine mid-20^th-century politics through the lens of gender and culture. Interviews with Betty Friedan was an exploration of Friedan’s political strategies and philosophy. My current research takes me in a slightly different direction, although still looking at woman’s place in 20^th-century America and politics. It will be a biography of aviation pioneer Phoebe Fairgrave Omlie, a contemporary of Amelia Earhart, who began her career as a barnstormer and later became a bureaucrat in the New Deal administration. Part of the network of New Deal women in the Roosevelt administration, Omlie was also the only woman to work in aviation at the federal level just as the field was becoming institutionalized. I am currently working with my colleague, Dr. Beverly Bond, on a History of the University of Memphis to be released in conjunction with the university’s centennial celebration in 2012.

Courses taught

Gateway Program in History (Rutgers University), American Women/American Lives (New York Council for the Humanities), U.S. Survey, U.S. Since World War II, Black and White Women in American History, Gender and Sexuality as Issues in American Politics, American Public History, Teaching for Teaching Assistants, The American Civil Rights Movement, The Sixties in America, Women in American Politics, Modern America, Whose History Is It, Anyway?

Representative publications

• The Perfect 36: Tennessee Delivers Woman Suffrage (with Carol Yellin), Iris Press, 1998.
• No Place for a Woman: A Life of Senator Margaret Chase Smith, Rutgers University Press,1999.
• Interviews with Betty Friedan, University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
• Memphis in Black and White (with Beverly G. Bond), Arcadia Publishing, 2003.
• Beale Street (with Beverly G. Bond), Arcadia Publishing, 2006.
• “‘The Vice Admiral’: Margaret Chase Smith and the Investigation of Congested Areas in Wartime” in The Home-Front War: World War II and American Society, Kenneth P. O’Brien and Lynn Parsons, eds., Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 119-137.
• “‘Senator-at-Large for America’s Women’: Margaret Chase Smith and the Paradox of Gender Affinity” in The Impact of Women in Public Office, Susan Carroll, ed. Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 89-116.
• “Naval Affairs: The Wartime Activities of Margaret Chase Smith,” in The Human Tradition in the World War II Era, Malcolm Muir, Jr., ed. Scholarly Resources, 2000, pp. 121-138.

(Personal Web site has reviews and illustrations of book covers.)