Rebecca Edwards is a Professor of History at Vassar College. Her research interests focus on the post-Civil War era and include electoral politics, environmental history, and the history of women and gender roles. She is the author of Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (1997) and New Spirits: Americans in the "Gilded Age," 1865-1905 (Second Edition, 2010). She is currently working on a biography of women's rights advocate and People's Party orator Mary E. Lease.