Micki McElya is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut specializing in the histories of women, gender, sexuality, and racial formation in the United States from the Civil War to the present, with an emphasis on political culture and memory. She is author of Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (2007) and The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (2016), which was a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. McElya is currently at work on her next book, No More Miss America! How Protesting the 1968 Pageant Changed a Nation, to be published by Avid Reader Press (Simon & Schuster). This work is supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar grant.