Academic Historian

Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel is the Mary Frances Barnard Professor of Nineteenth-Century American History at the University of Tulsa.  She is the author of Bleeding Borders: Race, Gender, and Violence in Pre-Civil War Kansas (LSU Press, 2009); the co-author with Marilyn Blackwell of Frontier Feminist: Clarina Howard Nichols and the Politics of Motherhood (University Press of Kansas, 2010); and the author of Harriet Tubman: Slavery, the Civil War, and Civil Rights (Routledge 2016). Oertel received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and her M.A. from SUNY-Binghamton; she is a native of Kansas City.

“Blazing a Path to Freedom: African Americans and Their White Allies in Bleeding Kansas”

In the following article University of Tulsa historian Kristen T. Oertel describes the people who like John Brown helped enslaved African Americans in Missouri escape to freedom in Kansas Territory through the western Underground Railroad. African Americans have valorized John Brown throughout history, linking a … Read More“Blazing a Path to Freedom: African Americans and Their White Allies in Bleeding Kansas”