Kate Masur is an associate professor of History at Northwestern University. She has written extensively on race and politics in the nineteenth-century United States, including in her first book, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle Over Equality in Washington, DC (2010). With Gregory P. Downs, she co-authored, for the US National Park Service, the National Historic Landmark Theme Study on the Era of Reconstruction (2017) and serves as co-editors of the Journal of the Civil War Era.