01/02/2024

Heath Hardage Lee

FLARE Member-at-large,

 Heath is an award-winning historian, biographer, curator and lecturer who specializes in women’s history.  She comes from a museum education and curatorial background, and she has worked at history museums across the country including Stratford Hall, Salisbury House and Gardens, and the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. She holds a B.A. in History with Honors from Davidson College, and an M.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia.

Heath’s first book, Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause (Potomac Books/UNP) won the Colonial Dames of America (CDA) Annual Book Award as well as a Gold Medal for Nonfiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.  Her second book The League of Wives:  The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the U.S. Government to Bring Their Husbands Home from Vietnam (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) won the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) Women in American History Award.  The League of Wives was first optioned for a feature film, and it is now being developed into a television series.  Heath’s museum exhibition entitled The League of Wives:  Vietnam POW MIA Advocates & Allies premiered at the Dole Institute of Politics in May of 2017 and travelled to venues all over the United States through 2023.  Heath is also the Historian on the Board of the League of Wives Memorial Project in Coronado, California. 

Heath and her work have been featured on the Today Show, C-Span, and on the Smithsonian Channel’s America’s Hidden Stories.  She also writes about women’s history and politics for publications such as Time, The Hill, The Atlantic and White House History Quarterly.  Heath’s next book is a biography of First Lady Pat Nixon entitled The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon:  The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady, to be published August 6, 2024, by St. Martin’s Press.  She is also developing a documentary of Pat Nixon.