Learn more about Nasstrom's Nobody's Fool (Cornell University Press, 2000).




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Kathryn Nasstrom

Kathryn Nasstrom and Frances Pauley, the subject of her recent book, Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool
Kathryn Nasstrom is an Associate Professor of History at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches U.S. history, women's history, and oral history. She is the author of Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice, the life story of an elderly, southern, white civil rights activist. She has been active in the Oral History Association on the Book Award Committee and the Nominating Committee, and she is the convenor of Bay Area Oral Historians, a working group of oral historians in the San Francisco bay region. Nasstrom received her PhD in history from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1993, and was the acting director of the SOHP in 1993-94.

Selected Oral History Publications

  • Everybody's Grandmother and Nobody's Fool: Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for Social Justice (Cornell University Press, 2000)
  • "Beginnings and Endings: Life Stories and the Periodization of the Civil Rights Movement," Journal of American History 86, Sept. 1999.
  • "Down to Now: Memory Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement in Atlanta, Georgia," Gender & History 11, April 1999.
  • "Practice and Pedagogy: Oral History in the Classroom," special issue guest co-editor, with Charles R. Lee, and co-author, "Introduction," Oral History Review 25, Summer/Fall 1998.
  • "Peace Profile: Frances Freeborn Pauley," Peace Review 10, March 1998.
  • "'More Was Expected of Us': The North Carolina League of Women Voters and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s," North Carolina Historical Review, LXVIII, July 1991.


Selected Oral History Presentations

  • "All we had was a law and two or three people who believed in it': Frances Freeborn Pauley and the Struggle for School Desegregation," Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Mar. 31, 2000.
  • "The Activism and Storytelling of Frances Freeborn Pauley," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 6, 1999.
  • "Memory, Narrative, and Women's Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement," Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy, Feb. 25, 1997.
  • "'Mother Love' and the Atlanta Approach to School Desegregation," Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 8, 1996.
  • "'The Women Have a Tremendous Part to Play': Remembering Atlanta's African-American Women and the Voter Registration Drive of 1946," Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Apr. 16, 1994.
  • "Down to Now: The Gendered Memory of Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement," Fall Meeting of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, Nov. 12, 1993.
  • "Occupation-'Mama': Women and the Politics of School Desegregation in Atlanta, Georgia," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Nov. 5, 1992.
  • "'More Was Expected of Us': The North Carolina League of Women Voters and the Feminist Movement in the 1920s," North Carolina Museum of History Symposium on North Carolina Women's History, Mar. 26, 1990.



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