South, emancipation, Reconstruction, and African American women's history. She is the author of Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and a coeditor of two volumes of Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 (Ser. 1, Vols. 1 and 3, 1985 and 1990), a part of the Freedmen and Southern Society Project. She is currently completing two books, "Women at War: Race, Gender, and Power in the American Civil War" and "African American Women and Children Refugees: A History of War and the Making of Freedom."