History Peeps: Dr. Elizabeth Cobbs, Melbern G. Glasscock Professor of History
Dr. Elizabeth Cobbs grew up down a two-mile dirt road on the far outskirts of San Diego, California. As a child, she vividly remembers the weekly drive to the local library miles away to check-out novels featuring heroines of ancient Egypt, medieval England, and revolutionary France. After returning home, she would make a peanut butter sandwich to fuel herself for a long, literary adventure to faraway times and places.
Before attending college, Dr. Cobbs worked as an activist to promote equal rights for youth and women, employed by various nonprofit organizations. At twenty-two, she enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, majoring in Literature with a minor in International Relations and another in Philosophy. Because she loved sussing out the backstory of these topics, she quickly saw history as the common thread uniting them. She decided to continue her education in the field of History, earning a Master’s and Ph.D. from Stanford. After teaching for twenty-five years in California, she joined the faculty at A&M.
In addition to writing works of traditional history, Dr. Cobbs also writes historical fiction, reflecting her childhood love of the genre. She relishes immersing readers in the sensate experiences of the past. For example, while writing The Tubman Command, Dr. Cobbs traveled to South Carolina to stick her hands in the tar-like mud lining the banks of the Combahee River to better understand the harsh physical obstacles enslaved men and women encountered while escaping bondage. She states, “You have to go there to see those things. You will never figure that out from going to an archive.”
One of Dr. Cobbs’s most rewarding professional experiences was watching her World War One nonfiction book on America’s first women soldiers, The Hello Girls, come to life in an off-Broadway musical. While sitting in the audience on 59th Street in New York, surrounded by the granddaughters of the Hello Girls, Cobbs states, “I had stars in my eyes. They were fantastic.” Hello Girls also became a children’s book.
Cobbs hopes her scholarship spotlights how people of color and women helped weave the fabric of American history. She wants her scholarship to help readers reimagine history, revealing that our past “was as diverse as our present.”
To what historical figure would Dr. Cobbs like to say “howdy” if given a chance? She would love to meet social reformer and women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony because, along with her humor and wit, Anthony was “a person of great integrity and soul.”
By Jennifer Wells ‘24