Laura Free is a historian. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her areas of research are gender, race, and voting rights in the United States of the 19th Century.Previously, Free taught at Cornell University, and before that at Binghamton University.Her first book, "Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race and Voting Rights in the Civil War Er," was published in 2015.Free received her B.A. in Political Science from Grinnell College, her M.A. in the History of Women from the State University of New York at Binghamton, her M.A. in American History from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in American History from Cornell University.