Etcheson, Nicole 1963-

PERSONAL: Born April 30, 1963, in Huntington, NY; daughter of Gerald (a naval officer) and Joy (a high school mathematics teacher) Etcheson; married Robert J. Williams, August 16, 1986; children: Robert. Education: Grinnell College, B.A., 1985; Indiana University, Ph.D., 1991.

ADDRESSES: Office— Ball State University, 2000 University, Muncie, IN 47306. E-mail— netcheson@bsu.edu.

CAREER: Hiram College, Hiram, OH, assistant professor of history, 1991-92; University of South Dakota, Vermillion, assistant professor of history, 1992-96; University of Texas at El Paso, associate professor of history, 1996-2005; Ball State University, Muncie, IN, Alexander M. Bracken Professor of History, 2005—. South Dakota History Day, state coordinator, 1992-96; El Paso History Day, regional coordinator, 1996-2005.

WRITINGS

The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1996.

Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 2004.

Contributor to books, including The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1787-1861, edited by Jeffrey B. Brown and Andrew R.L. Cayton, Kent State University Press (Kent, OH), 1994; Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History, New York University Press (New York, NY), 1999; The American Midwest: Essays on Regional History, edited by Andrew R.L. Cayton and Susan E. Gray, [Bloomington, IN], 2001; and Territorial Kansas Reader, edited by Virgil W. Dean, [Topeka, KS], 2005; and John Brown to Bob Dole: Movers and Shakers in Kansas History, edited by Virgil W. Dean, University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including Ohio Valley History, North and South, American Nineteenth Century History, Journal of the Early Republic, and Kansas History.

SIDELIGHTS: Nicole Etcheson told CA: “As a teacher, I’ve always had difficulty advising students who don’t know what career they want. I’ve always known that I loved history, although, given the academic job market, I didn’t always know I would be able to be a professional historian.

“My writing projects almost always focus on the Midwest and the Civil War. In graduate school I wanted to focus my dissertation on the much-neglected Midwest, and so my first book, The Emerging Midwest: Upland Southerners and the Political Culture of the Old Northwest, discussed the growth of a unique politics and society in the Midwest as migrants from North and South forged a new kind of culture. While working on that book, I found that Midwesterners were often arguing about the situation in Bleeding Kansas, where pro-slavery and free-state settlers were waging an early version of the conflict that would lead to national civil war. The Kansas Civil War of the 1850s became the subject of my second book, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era. I am now at work on a third book, a micro-history of the Union home front through the history of one Indiana county. Putnam County was home to both loyal Unionists, many of whom fought for the North, and antiwar Democrats, whose draft resistance unionists considered treasonous.”