Nikki M. Taylor facts for kids
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Nikki M. Taylor is an American historian. She teaches history at Howard University. She has written four books about African-American history in the 1800s.
Contents
Nikki Taylor's Early Life and Education
Nikki Marie Taylor was born in Toledo, Ohio. When she was in college, she studied United States history at the University of Pennsylvania. She was part of a special program for minority students. She had planned to become a lawyer, but she found history so interesting that she changed her mind. She finished her studies in 1994.
After college, she went to Ghana to study history with a special scholarship called a Fulbright Fellowship. When she came back to the US, she went to Duke University. There, she earned her master's degree in 1996 and her PhD in US history in 2001. She also earned a certificate in women's studies. Her PhD paper was about the experiences of African Americans in Cincinnati from 1802 to 1862.
Teaching Career
From 2001 to 2005, Dr. Taylor taught American history at Vassar College. Then, she moved to the University of Cincinnati, where she taught until 2013. In 2014, she became a professor and head of the history and geography department at Texas Southern University.
In 2017, she joined Howard University. At Howard, she is a Professor in the Department of History. She was also the head of the department from 2018 to 2023.
Exploring History Through Research
Dr. Taylor's research focuses on African-American history in the 1800s. She is especially interested in stories from Ohio and Kentucky.
Her first book, Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community 1802-68, looked at how an African-American community grew in an area close to where slavery was still happening.
Her next book was about an important person from that time: America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark. This book explores how Peter H. Clark's ideas changed over time. He started as someone who wanted to end slavery, then became a socialist, and later a more traditional politician.
Her third book is also a biography, which is a story about someone's life. It tells the story of Margaret Garner. Margaret Garner was an enslaved woman in Kentucky who briefly escaped. When she was caught, she made a desperate choice to protect her children from being enslaved again. (Margaret Garner's story also inspired Toni Morrison's famous novel Beloved.) Dr. Taylor's book is called Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio. In this book, Dr. Taylor explains that Margaret Garner's desperate act was the only way she felt she could protect her children as an enslaved mother.
Following her work on Margaret Garner, Dr. Taylor is working on a fourth book. This project explores how enslaved women used strong actions to resist slavery.
Dr. Taylor has received special awards and grants to help her with her research. She also leads two big grants at Howard University. These include a grant from the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program in 2017 and a Mellon Just Futures grant in 2021.
Books by Nikki M. Taylor
- Frontiers of Freedom: Cincinnati's Black Community 1802-68 (2005)
- America's First Black Socialist: The Radical Life of Peter H. Clark (2013)
- Driven Toward Madness: The Fugitive Slave Margaret Garner and Tragedy on the Ohio (2016)
