About Me

I am a historian of the 20th-century United States, focusing especially on legal history, women’s history, and the history of U.S. foreign relations. I am currently the Michael G. and Barbara W. Rahal Professor of History at Denison University.

Much of my published work is on U.S. women’s international activism in the first half of the twentieth century. My first book, Pan American Women: U.S. Internationalists and Revolutionary Mexico (Penn, 2014), analyzes U.S. and Mexican women’s efforts at cooperation during the years of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1940). My second, Citizens of the World: U.S. Women and Global Government (Penn, 2022), is a history of women’s internationalist thought between 1900 and 1950. I profile nine women who saw themselves as world citizens and promoted world government in various ways. I’ve also written several articles on U.S. women’s internationalism that have appeared in Diplomatic History, Peace & Change, and History of Education Quarterly.

Over the last few years I’ve shifted my focus away from U.S. women and toward the law. My current book is Selective Justice: The Draft, the Law, and the Vietnam War, a study of legal battles over the draft in the 1960s and 70s. Based on court records, archival material, personal interviews, and other sources, the book explores how courtroom debates over conscription stretched far beyond the Vietnam War and touched a range of issues at the heart of American life.

You can reach me at threlkeldm@denison.edu and follow me on Twitter at @MeganThrelkeld.