George and Ann RichardsCivil War Era Center

Hope McCaffrey is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at Northwestern University, where she studies the history of gender, race, and politics in the mid-nineteenth-century United States. Hope’s dissertation, titled “‘White Men or None’: White Women and Democratic Politics in the Free States, 1840–1865,” examines why free-state white women aligned with the Democrats, the more white supremacist and patriarchal of the two political parties, and how these women in turn shaped the course of Civil War–era politics. Hope also specializes in public history and digital history. She recently co-curated an exhibit during her time as a fellow at the New-York Historical Society, and she is the lead project developer on a digital exhibit that explores the life of William Ivens Craft, a son of the famed self-emancipated activists and abolitionists, William and Ellen Craft.