Margaret Garb (1962–2018)

Margaret Garb was born in Trenton, New Jersey, and raised in an 18th-century farmhouse in Buckingham Township, Pennsylvania. Her father, who served as a judge, was passionate about prison reform, especially for young offenders, and her mother was a reproductive rights activist. She studied at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris before earning a bachelor’s degree in comparative religion from the University of Vermont. She then worked as a reporter in Chicago, on the police beat, and later wrote for The New York Times, among others. She earned her master’s degree in history from the University of California, San Diego, and her doctorate from Columbia University in New York, where she studied with Eric Foner. She joined the Arts & Sciences faculty of Washington University in St. Louis in 2001, teaching courses on the American city and the history of poverty, race, and social reform. She also co-directed Wash U.'s Prison Education Program. Her numerous publications included the books City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform, Chicago 1871-1919 (2005) and Freedom’s Ballot: African-American Political Struggles in Chicago from Abolition to the Great Migration (2014). She held fellowships at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Collegium de Lyon in France. She also won a Fulbright Fellowship to study in the Philippines, though her final illness prevented her from going. In 2017, she was featured on C-SPAN’s "Lectures in History" program, discussing the birth of the skyscraper. She was married to Mark Gregory Pegg, also a professor of history at Wash U., with whom she had a daughter. She died of cancer at age 56 in 2018.