Rebecca Brenner Graham, Author at CONTINGENT

Rebecca Brenner Graham

Rebecca Brenner Graham is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, Jan. 2025) and a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. Previously, she taught at the Madeira School and American University. She has a PhD in history and MA in public history from American University and a BA in history and philosophy from Mount Holyoke College. In 2023, she was awarded a Cokie Roberts Fellowship from the National Archives Foundation and a Rubenstein Center Research Fellowship from the White House Historical Association. In addition to Contingent, her writing has been published in Time, Slate, Ms., the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other places.

Bonus

The Last Frontier

By Rebecca Brenner Graham | May 3, 2025

Antisemitism was as integral to this story as imperialism.

Postcards

A Postcard From Washington, D.C.

By Rebecca Brenner Graham | October 7, 2019

Seeing Railway Mail Service badges makes the postal carriers and clerks that I read about in other archives seem more real.

Features

No Refuge

By Rebecca Brenner Graham | August 23, 2019

When Congress gave the Secretary of Labor discretion over any immigrant “likely to become a public charge,” they weren’t expecting someone like Frances Perkins.