An expert in urban history, Constance McLaughlin Green (1897-1975) won the 1963 Pulitzer Prize for history at a time when there were few published women historians.

Constance McLaughlin Green was born into an academic family August 21, 1897, at Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her father, Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, was a professor of constitutional history at the University of Michigan and then at the University of Chicago. He won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1936, an accomplishment his daughter repeated in 1963 for the first volume of her study of Washington, D.C.

Green was a pioneer in the field of urban history, and her work provides an example of the early narrative approach to the subject. She began to write on the subject prior to its becoming popular in America's colleges and universities during the 1960s. Moreover, she was a successful published female historian at a time when the discipline of history did...