Rebecca Brenner Graham | Guest: UNSUNG HISTORY

Rebecca Brenner Graham is author of Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (Kensington, 2025).

Rebecca is 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.

Her writing has been published in the Washington Post, Time, Slate, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

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Dec. 23, 2024

Frances Perkins

On March 4, 1933, Frances Perkins was sworn in as the 4th Secretary of Labor. It was the first time in United States history that a woman served in the Cabinet, only 13 years after the ratification of the 19th Amendment gave women the right to vote. Perkins came into office with a long list of to-do items, and she succeeded in accomplishing nearly all of them in her long tenure, as a central architect of many of the programs of the New Deal, especially the Social Security Act. More quietly, but ...

Guest: Rebecca Brenner Graham

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