Constance K. Escher

Constance K. Escher is a former Research Associate at the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. She earned her A.B. at Vassar and did graduate work at Dartmouth. She won the Amistad Award from the New Jersey Amistad Commission, teaching African American history at Princeton Middle School, during her 26 years there. She has published articles in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (P.A.W.) and the Vassar Quarterly. Her book, "She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton: The Illustrated Odyssey of a Princeton Slave," caps forty years of research and earlier biographical publications of Stockton's life (1798-1865), detailing the global efforts of this heroic woman of color who overcame racism, poverty and gender preference to teach indigenous Hawaiian and Ojibwa children in Lahaina, Maui, and Grape Island, Upper Canada. She founded schools for children of color at Philadelphia's "Infant School for the Coloured" and in her hometown of Princeton, where she founded four schools, including a college-preparatory adult night school, and an 185-year old still-vibrant church on Witherspoon Street.

AWARD WINNER: In October, 2022, Escher's book, She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton, was named the BEST scholarly non-fiction Book written by a New Jersey Author about a New Jersey subject, by the New Jersey Authors Awards Committee, an arm of the New Jersey Historical Commission.