Dale Center for the Study of War and Society
Margaret Boone Dale Women and War Graduate Fellowship
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Photo from left-to-right: Beverly Dale, Margaret Boone Dale, Lt. Col. John H. Dale, Sr.
The Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship for the study of Women and War was established by the Dale family in 2014 in memory of the family matriarch, Margaret Boone Dale. The fellowship supports the research of a war and society graduate student working on a project that addresses issues examining women in war, families in war, or war and gender. Fellowship recipients are selected by the Faculty Fellows of the Dale Center.
Fellowship Recipients:
2022 Lindsey Peterson (PhD Candidate)
The Margaret Boone Dale Women and War Graduate Fellowship allowed PhD Candidate Lindsey Peterson to travel to the Library of Congress, Wisconsin Veterans Museum, Arizona State Historical Society, and four other Arizona university archives and special collections to complete the final phase of her dissertation. Thanks to the fellowship’s funding, she also presented her research at the Society for Civil War Historians conference in Philadelphia, where she was awarded the Outstanding Paper by a Graduate Student award. Her paper, entitled “Distinguish[ing] Mankind from the Brute Creation”: How Western Union Veterans used Commemorative Rituals to Bolster Settler Colonialism,” argues Indigenous women used their membership in Civil War commemorative associations to advance tribal sovereignty. Lindsey is working under the direction of Dr. Susannah J. Ural.
2019-2021 Lucas Somers (PhD candidate)
Lucas R. Somers, working under the supervision of Dr. Susannah J. Ural, is using his Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship to fund several research trips to study archival sources and primary documents about several communities in Kentucky and Tennessee in the years directly after the American Civil War. Lucas will visit the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and the Kentucky Historical Society’s Military Records and Research Branch in Frankfort, as well as the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky; the Tennessee State Library and Archives in Nashville, the Williamson County Archives in Franklin, Tennessee; and the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. Somers’s dissertation research focuses on how military occupation and the Freedman’s Bureau affected schools for newly-freed African Americans in the post-war period. These issues ultimately helped shape Reconstruction in Upper-South states. The research is focused in large part on the white and black women, especially teachers, mothers, and interested observers. Lucas’s research analyzes how local processes of military occupation and emancipation reveal more about the postwar period than the traditional political framework of Reconstruction often employed by historians.
2015 Lindsey R. Peterson (PhD candidate) 
Lindsey R. Peterson is a PhD candidate at the University of 51¶şÄĚ Mississippi working under the supervision of Dr. Susannah J. Ural. Lindsey used the inaugural Margaret Boone Dale Fellowship from the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society to access online newspaper databases and obtain Civil War women's auxiliary organizations’ annual convention journals from 1883–1939 in the twelve trans-Mississippi states. This research will contribute to her dissertation, which examines how Union men and women in the trans-Mississippi commemorated the American Civil War. Focused on the Woman’s Relief Corps, Daughters of Union Veterans, and Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, Lindsey's research analyzes how gendered and regional Civil War memory developed in spaces that served as frontiers, not battle fronts, during the war and have been understudied in the historic literature.
