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Todd M. Mealy (born July 20, 1979) is an American historian and William Howard Day scholar. He is the author or editor of several books, the most recent being Shades of Brown: The Official Biography of Jane Elliott and the Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes Exercise (2023), a biography of educator Jane Elliott.

Biography

Todd M. Mealy was born on July 20, 1979, in Bradford, Pennsylvania. He is of Irish and Italian ancestry. As a child, Mealy grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where he attended Bishop McDevitt High School. He was an all-state linebacker on his high school’s football team that won the PIAA State Championship in 1995.

Mealy earned a doctorate in American Studies at Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg in 2018. A graduate of Millersville University (B.A. Secondary Education, Social Studies, 2001) and Penn State, Harrisburg (MA, 2014), he lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. His scholarly abilities were recognized at Penn State, here he was awarded the John S. Patterson Award in 2014 for outstanding academic achievement by a Master’s student and the Sue Samuelson Award for outstanding academic achievement by a doctoral student in 2018. His Master’s Thesis, titled “Black Arise,” was later published as the book This Is the Rat Speaking (2017) and his doctoral dissertation “War Seasons: Glenn Killinger, Service Football, and the Birth of the American Hero in Postwar American Culture” was later published as the book Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State's World War I Era Sports Hero (2018).

In 2001, Mealy started teaching U.S. history at J.P. McCaskey High School in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He left McCaskey for Penn Manor High School in 2007, where he became the head football coach (2007-2014) and taught U.S. history and AP Seminar. During his eight seasons as head coach, Mealy became Penn Manor’s all-time wins leader in both games won and winning percentage. He later became the head football coach at Lancaster Catholic (2018-2019) before retiring after developing vocal dysfunction and undergoing several vocal surgeries.

Since 2018, Mealy occasionally works as an adjunct professor in the History Department at Dickinson College.

In 2022, he founded the National Institute for Customizing Education, LLC. In the position of Executive Director, he has overseen curriculum-writing projects, including work with The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center on Nonviolent Social Change.

Also in 2022, Mealy returned to J.P. McCaskey High School to work full time.

Writing Career

Mealy’s first publication was an Underground Railroad monograph about his hometown, Biography of an Anti-Slavery City: Antislavery Advocates, Abolitionists, and Underground Railroad Operatives in Harrisburg, PA (2007). In 2010, he wrote Aliened American: A Biography of William Howard Day, published in two volumes (1825-1865, 1866-1900). His work on African American educator, abolitionist, and newspaper publisher William Howard Day inspired the Pennsylvania State School Board Association to create an annual award recognizing innovative leadership in public school board governance, administration, and teaching. Other books by Mealy have trace the trajectory of civil rights history through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Titles include: This Is the Rat Speaking (2017), Race Conscious Pedagogy (2020), and The N-Word in Music: An American History (2022). He also coauthored a Holocaust book with survivor Linda Schwab titled Displaced: Surviving the Holocaust and the Road to a New Beginning with Linda Schwab (2019). For his only non-civil rights/human rights related book, Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State's World War I Era Sports Hero (2018), Mealy discovered hundreds of pages of the subject’s never-published memoir with the help of Killinger’s granddaughter, Jessica, to reconstruct the origin of the rise of celebrity culture in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

Mealy’s most recent academic book Shades of Brown: The Official Biography of Jane Elliott and the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise, is the only comprehensive biography of Jane Elliott. The book was written after gaining access to thousands of documents belonging to the Elliott family.

Since 2014, Mealy has written for the Pennsylvania Heritage Foundation’s print and online publication, Pennsylvania Heritage magazine. His articles for the magazine focus on the intersection of sports, education, and civil rights.

He has appeared in one podcast documentary, BBC’s “Untold Legends: Queen on two Courts: Ora Washington is the Star the World Ignore.”

Published Books

Shades of Brown: The Official Biography of Jane Elliott and the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes Exercise (2023)

Like a Champion: A Story about Building Confidence (coauthor, 2023)

In Sheep’s Clothing: The Idolatry of White Christian Nationalism – Chapter: “The Pedagogy of Hegemony” (2023)

Co-Editor. Equity Planning for School Leaders: Approaches to Student Diversity, Access and Opportunity (2023)

Co-Editor. Equity In the Classroom: Essays on Curricular Pedagogical Approaches to Empowering All Students (2022)

The N-Word in Music: An American History (2022)

Race Conscious Pedagogy: Disrupting Racism at Majority White High Schools (2020)

Displaced: Surviving the Holocaust and the Road to a New Beginning (2019)

Glenn Killinger, All-American: Penn State’s World War I Era Sports Hero (2018)

This Is the Rat Speaking: Black Power and the Promise of Racial Consciousness at Franklin and Marshall College in the Era of the Takeover, 1967-1969 (2017)

Legendary Locals of Harrisburg (2014)

Aliened American: A Biography of William Howard Day, 1825-1900 (2 Volumes, 2010)

Biography of an Antislavery City: Antislavery Advocates, Abolitionists, Underground Railroad Operatives (2007)

Article Publications

“The Fastest Man on Earth: Barney Ewell and the Story of Two Lost Olympiads” (2022)

“Without Fear and Without Reproach: Octavius V. Catto and the Early Civil Rights Movement in Pennsylvania” (2021)

“Fighter’s Heaven: Muhammad Ali’s Training Camp in the Pennsylvania Wilderness” (2020)

“Art Activists Unveil Harrisburg’s Frist Monument Honoring African American Trailblazers” (2020)

“Indomitable: Ora Washington, Philadelphia’s Ultimate Sports Trailblazer” (2020)

“100 Years: The Penn State-Pitt Rivalry” (2019)

“’I Must Be An Abolitionist’: Pennsylvania’s Liberty Man Francis Julius LeMoyne” (2017)

“Keep the Boys in College: How World War I Produced a Penn State Football Legend” (2016)

“Breaking the Color Line: The Trial that Led to the End of Legal Segregation in Pennsylvania’s Schools” (2016)

“The Case for the League that Pioneered the Civil Rights Movement” (2010)Italic text

See also

Official website References