Margaret D. Jacobs is the Charles Mach Professor of History and the Director of the Center for
Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). She also is a Program Faculty
member with Women’s and Gender Studies and directed that program from 2006-2011 and
2016-2018. Before joining the faculty at UNL in 2004, she taught at New Mexico State
University.
Jacobs focuses on the history of women and gender as well as children and families in the
American West in comparison with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. For over twenty years
she has studied and written about Indigenous child removal and family separation. Three of her four books and dozens of her articles concern government policies that mandated the removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities to distant boarding schools and other institutions, and after World War II, to non-Indigenous foster or adoptive families. She has also documented how Indigenous women mobilized transnationally to reclaim the care of their children. Jacobs’ book White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940 (2009), won the American historical profession’s most prestigious award, the Bancroft Prize from Columbia University, in 2010.
Since 2016, Jacobs has been researching and writing about efforts to confront and heal from historical trauma. She published After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands with Princeton University Press in 2021. Jacobs has embarked on several community-based projects that explore how scholars can more readily participate in truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation efforts. In 2017, she co-founded the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project with Libraries professor Liz Lorang and a council of Indigenous Community Advisors. The Project aims to repatriate government records of Nebraska’s Indian boarding school back to their families and tribal nations, to “bring history home.” In 2018, Jacobs cofounded Reconciliation Rising with local Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk. This multimedia project showcases Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who are honestly confronting painful and traumatic histories, promoting meaningful and respectful dialogue, and creating pathways to reconciliation.
Over the course of her career, Jacobs has won awards from the National Endowment from the Humanities, the Fulbright Program, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Council on Library and Information Services. From 2015-16 she served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University in England. She was awarded an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship from 2018-2020 and inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Jacobs has also relished teaching women’s and gender history to hundreds of students and mentoring many graduate students. She has developed many treasured relationships with her academic colleagues and community partners while raising two sons and four border collies with her husband, Tom Lynch.
