Barbara Welke
271 19th Ave S
Minneapolis,
MN
55455
I teach, research, and write about law in American life and modern U.S. history more generally.
My research has long combined topics that at first glance do not seem to fit together. In my first book, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2001), it was writing a history of railroads with women and gender at the center and bringing the legal history of accidental physical and psychic injury together with that of racial discrimination and Jim Crow. I traced there the transformation from a cultural and legal ethos of manly independence and autonomy to one that sought to protect the individual against the vulnerability and lack of control characteristic of modern life. As the final third of the narrative focusing on Jim Crow showed, “vulnerability” and “protection” were fundamentally racialized.
In my second book, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (Cambridge University Press, 2010), I brought together histories long seen as particular and distinct -- the history of race, gender, empire, immigration restriction, disability and more -- to trace the history of legal personhood and citizenship across the long nineteenth century. As I argued, it was only by looking across time that we could see the ways in which law accorded able, white, men full personhood and citizenship and the extent to which their status rested on the subordination and exclusion of racialized, gendered, and disabled others from what I called “the borders of belonging” not just before the Civil War but well after, fundamentally shaping constitutional law and the administrative state in the twentieth century. One of the book’s signal achievements was bringing disability fully into legal history in a way that had not been done before.
My forthcoming book, Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and The Course of a Life (University of Chicago Press, September 2026), is a braided narrative with three strands: a history of Americans’ first awakening to flammable fabrics through the injury and death of children across the United States burned in Gene Autry cowboy playsuits, my personal experience of heartbreaking loss, and the history of the curriculum vitae. Watch for updates!
Educational Background
- Ph.D: History, University of Chicago, 1995
- J.D.: Law, University of Michigan Law School, 1983
- B.A. : History and Political Science, University of Kansas, 1980
Specialties
- Modern U. S. History
- American Social and Legal History
- U. S. Women's History