Author Profiles

Dr. Mary Stockwell is a writer who has lived most of her life in the twelve-mile-by-twelve-mile square reserve carved out by Anthony Wayne near the mouth of the Maumee River in the Treaty of Greeneville. Her latest book Unlikely General: “Mad” Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America (Yale University Press, 2018) brings to life the man behind the myth of Mad Anthony. She got her love of history from her father who was proud of his Irish heritage and who took his children along remnants of 19^th century canals in Ohio reminding them that their ancestors came to this country to build them and for the freedom and opportunity that America promised. She got her love of storytelling from her mother who was an actress, director, acting teacher, and prize-winning poet.

After completing her Ph.D. in American history at the University of Toledo, where she was the last student of W. Eugene Hollon, the noted historian of the American West, she worked as a writer at Detroit Edison’s Fermi II Nuclear Power Plant. The experience taught her how people make decisions in the real world. These insights helped her become a better writer.

In 1996, she was hired as the American History Professor at Lourdes University, and in 2001, she became the Chair of its Department of History, Political Science, and Geography. She won the Faculty Excellence Award for her superior teaching three times at Lourdes University and was nominated by her institution for national teaching awards. She said goodbye to her teaching and administrative career in 2012 to become a full-time writer and to accept the Earhart Foundation Fellowship at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. She was also awarded a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship to study at the New York Public Library.

Mary Stockwell is the author of The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians (Westholme, 2015), a finalist for the Ohio Library Association’s Best Book on Ohio Award in 2016. She has also written history books used by young people throughout the United States including The Ohio Adventure, A Journey through Maine, and Massachusetts, Our Home, the 2005 winner of the Golden Lamp Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for Best Book, as well as The American Story: Perspectives and Encounters to 1865, a college level textbook used by students around the world. She is the author of Woodrow Wilson: The Last Romantic in the First Men: America’s Presidents Series, which has been nominated for the 2018 Dartmouth Medal. Her essays on George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt have appeared in major scholarly studies of these presidents. She has written for the website of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate. Stockwell’s Interrupted Odyssey: Ulysses S. Grant and the American Indians, the first complete study of Grant’s Indian policy, was published by the Southern Illinois University Press in September 2018.