Bio
Stacy Cordery is a professor of History who earned her PhD from the University of Texas, with a specialty in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Currently Dr. Cordery serves as president of SHGAPE (the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era), as an historical advisor to the Theodore Roosevelt Center, and as a board member for FLARE (the First Ladies Association for Research and Education). At Iowa State, Dr. Cordery recently stepped down from nine years as the faculty advisor for ISU’s Kappa Iota chapter of Phi Alpha Theta (the national History honor society), and as two years serving as the History Department’s Director of Undergraduate Studies (the DUST).
She is the author of Becoming Elizabeth Arden: The Woman Behind the Global Beauty Empire (Viking/Penguin, 2024), Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts (Viking/Penguin, 2012), and Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (Viking/Penguin, 2007), as well as two books about Theodore Roosevelt. Dr. Cordery has appeared on the History Channel, C-SPAN, Smithsonian TV, CNN, National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition, and the Diane Rehm Show, in addition to several podcasts. At Iowa State, she teaches First Ladies in U.S. History, the Gilded Age, the Historian’s Toolbox, and U.S. History Survey II.
Ask An Historian
When did you know you wanted to be an historian?
I was a Theatre major as an undergraduate, but I had to take two U.S. History courses. One of them, “First Ladies in U.S. History,” required a research paper. The first time I went to the archive on campus and held in my hand an actual letter written by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, I was hooked. I wanted to understand the larger context for everything I knew about plays and acting, and I wanted to learn by seeing and analyzing the actual “stuff” of history.