Hannah Reynolds is a PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University, where she specializes in women’s history of the nineteenth century. Her research examines the role of women in federal land grant policy, like the Homestead Act of 1862, and how Congress, local land offices, and settlers themselves imagined women and families as contrary to predatory market forces in the West. Before coming to Northwestern, she received her MA in History from Portland State University while working as a Social Studies teacher and Speech and Debate Coach at a public high school on the Oregon Coast.