The author of The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and the South, 1861-1865 (2000), she is interested in a broad view of American cultural history, including popular culture, print culture, and the market as well as more traditional subjects of intellectual inquiry. Most recently, she published an edition of Hospital Sketches (2003), Louisa May Alcott’s classic account of her nursing experiences during the Civil War, and a study of late-nineteenth-century American society and culture entitled Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Modern Public Space (2011).