Janet Croon

Janet Croon has recently retired from teaching advanced high school history in Fairfax County, Virginia. Originally from the Chicago area, she has lived in several places, including Dayton, OH, Albuquerque, NM, and Wiesbaden, Germany before eventually ending up in the Northern Virginia suburbs.

She holds degrees from the University of Illinois (BA '83) in Political Science, Modern European History, and Russian Language and Area Studies and the University of Dayton (MA '85) in International Relations. (This was all very handy when living in Germany in 1989 when the Berllin Wall came down!) She began teaching World History and Twentieth Century Topics in the International Baccalaureate Programme, for which she also did some contract work as a program moderator and student paper examiner.

The love for the Civil War came almost by accident, finding out that she was working with her lawyer on her divorce papers in the former home of a Confederate female spy, and then reading a book about that same spy's friend a number of years later. (More books on this to follow...)

With two grown daughters successfully launched, Jan spends a lot of her spare time knitting, cross-stitching, watching Cubs baseball, and enjoying the history of the area once occupied by either Blue or Grey for the entirety of the Civil War. Her black cat, Kittn, supervises.