Meg Groeling

MegThompson-smMeg currently teaches math at Brownell Middle School, named for E. E. Brownell, a California educator who was named for Colonel Elmer Ellsworth and is related to Corporal Francis Brownell, the man who shot the man who killed Ellsworth. She has also taught at other public schools in California and Maryland.  She contributes to World At War and Strategy and Tactics, history and war-gaming magazines.  Her undergraduate degree in Liberal Studies with a minor in American History was from California State University, Long Beach, and she is preparing to earn a Masters degree in History, with a Civil War emphasis.

She has been working for over a year on First Fallen: the Life and Times of Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, the only biography written about Ellsworth since Ruth Painter Randall’s, published in 1960.  It should be ready to find a publisher soon.  In it, she challenges some of the assumptions made about Ellsworth, and uses his life as a lens through which to view the attitudes and events of the urban North prior to the Civil War.