Dr. Linda Van Ingen

Specialization Areas

20th Century United States, Civil Rights, Cold War, Immigration, Women’s History

Biography

Dr. Linda Van Ingen is professor and chair of the Department of History. She teaches 20th Century US social and political history, as well as Women's History, Civil Rights, and Immigration history. She joined the faculty at UNK in 2001 after earning her Ph.D. in History from the University of California-Riverside in 2000. She previously taught as a Visiting Faculty Fellow at California State University-San Marcos, as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Redlands in California, and as a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California-Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City in 1984. In addition to the Midwest and Great Plains states, she has lived in California and Massachusetts as well as internationally in Port Elizabeth and Johannesburg, South Africa, and Casablanca, Morocco. She has traveled widely, including many visits to the Netherlands and a semester in England as an undergraduate. She encourages students to pursue international opportunities and has led short study abroad trips, most recently to Amsterdam, Paris, and London. Let her know if you are interested in organizing one of these tours that bring history to life!

Teaching

• HIST 126, Leadership in a Complex World 
• HIST 176, Democratic Debates
• HIST 250, American History: Colonial-1865
• HIST 251, American History: 1865-Present
• HIST 421, Women in America
• HIST 484, US History 1898-1945
• HIST 485, US History 1945-Present
• HIST 495, ST: The 1960s
• HIST 495, ST: The Immigrant Experience
• HIST 496, Senior Seminar: Recent America
• HIST 801, America Interpreted (graduate online)
• HIST 813, Critical Moments: The Roosevelts (graduate online)
• HIST 848, American Women’s History (graduate online)
• HIST 848, The Long Civil Rights Movement (graduate online)
• HIST 848, US in the Cold War Era (graduate online)
• HIST 894, Introduction to Thesis (graduate online)
• ETHS 101, Introduction to Ethnic Studies
• WSTD 220, Women’s & Gender Studies
• WSTD 420, Research Seminar in Women’s & Gender Studies

Research

Dr. Van Ingen focuses her teaching and research on modern US political and social history with a special interest in issues of gender, race, and class. Her research publications contribute to the historiography of women in politics with studies of women candidates’ early twentieth-century campaigns in California and the gendered politics of power. She has also researched the rise of women’s late nineteenth-century independence, applying a class analysis to the financial challenges single women teachers faced as they aged. Current research applies an international lens to the gendered politics of the Cold War era, exploring the rise of Americans living overseas in what Life and Time Magazine magnate Henry Luce and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce called the “American Century.” Dr. Van Ingen mentors undergraduate and graduate student research projects on twentieth-century US political and social history, including women’s history, civil rights, and immigration history.

Publications

Work in Progress:

“Living Overseas: Americans Abroad in the Cold War Era, 1950s-1970s.”
“Nebraska’s Bicameral Women Legislators: A Look at the State’s First Four, 1922-1938”

Book:

• Linda Van Ingen, Gendered Politics: Campaign Strategies of California Women Candidates, 1912-1970. Series in Women in American Political History (Lexington Press, 2017).

Articles:

• Van Ingen, Linda. “‘I Do Not Mean to Frown on Everything the Men Propose’: California’s First Assemblywomen in the Forty-Third Session of the Legislature, 1919,” California History (November 2020), 1-26.
• Van Ingen, Linda. “‘One Can’t Live on Air’: Sarah McComb and the Problem of Old-Age Income for Single Women Teachers, 1870s-1930s.” History of Education Quarterly 54, no. 2 (May 2014): 172-96.
• Van Ingen, Linda. “‘If We Can Get Her Nominated, She is a Cinch to Elect:’ Helen Gahagan Douglas and the Gendered Politics of Accommodation, 1940-1944.” Journal of Women’s History 24, no.3 (Fall 2012): 140-63.
• Davis, R., Ellis, M.R. and Van Ingen, L. “Civic Engagement and Task Force Teaching: Integrating the Veterans History Project into the University Classroom.” The History Teacher 42, no. 3 (May 2009): 341-49.
• Van Ingen, Linda. “The Limits of State Suffrage: California Women Candidates in the Progressive Era.” Pacific Historical Review 73, no. 1 (February 2004): 21-48.
• Van Ingen, Linda. “Hubert Humphrey.” In Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, edited by David J. Wishart. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
• Linda Van Ingen, “Rodolfo ‘Corky’ Gonzales.” In Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, edited by David J. Wishart. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

HIstory Faculty Research Directory