Travis Gilbert is an amateur historian of the American South and author of Port City Redux, a blog exploring the effects of historic preservation in the city of Wilmington, North Carolina. Gilbert received his B.A. in history from Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, where he completed original research on Maryland secessionist Enoch Louis Lowe and his wife, Esther Winder Polk Lowe. Additionally, Gilbert has written about gender and sectionalism within early twentieth-century memorialization in Western Maryland. Historians that have greatly influenced Gilbert's work include southern women's historians Anne Firor Scott and Drew Gilpin Faust, social historian Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and David Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
From 2009-2011, Gilbert represented the 1.8 million public school children in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as student member on the Pennsylvania State Board of Education. During his tenure, Pennsylvania adopted the National Governor Association's Common Core Curriculum and reformed health and wellness standards in the public school system. In 2011, Gilbert advocated for responsible energy policy and rural political engagement as Youth National Spokesperson for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association.
Currently, Gilbert is editing the 1913 autobiography of Maryland First Lady Esther Winder Polk Lowe and Lowe Family Papers for publication online under an agreement with the Maryland Historical Society.
