Ruth Wallis Herndon

professor, history, University of Toledo

Dr. Ruth Herndon, Associate Professor (Ph.D., American University, 1992). Dr. Herndon's teaching and research focus on early American social history, with a special emphasis on marginalized people in the colonial and Revolutionary eras--children, women, the poor, servants, and slaves. Her major publications include a monograph on the transient poor in the eighteenth century, Unwelcome Americans: Living on the Margin in Early New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), an essay in the Journal of Economic History (co-authored with John E. Murray), "Markets for Children: The Political Economy of Pauper Apprenticeship" (2002), and an anthology (co-edited with John E. Murray), Children Bound to Labor: Pauper Apprenticeship in Early America (Cornell University Press, 2009). For over ten years, Dr. Herndon has been collaborating with Dr. Ella Wilcox Sekatau, medicine woman, ethnohistorian and genealogist of the Narragansett Tribe, on a project to re-tell New England history using both Euro-American and Narragansett sources. They have published several jointly-authored essays, one of which won the Heizer prize from the American Society for Ethnohistory in 1998. Dr. Herndon's current project is Children of Misfortune: The Fates of Boston's Poor Apprentices, a study that traces the lives of children bound out from the Boston almshouse in the eighteenth century. More information can be found on Dr. Herndon's webpage: http://personal.bgsu.edu/~rwhernd/ [Source: http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/history/faculty/page36357.html]