Elizabeth Cobbs is an American historian, commentator and author of nine books including three novels, a history textbook and five non-fiction works.

[1] She retired from Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History[2] at Texas A&M University (2015-2023), following upon a four-decade career in California where she began working for the Center for Women's Studies and Services as a teenager.

Elizabeth Cobbs started her writing career at the age of 15 as a community organizer and publications coordinator for the Center for Women's Studies and Services in Southern California.

During this period, she founded and headed several innovative projects for adults and young people supported partly by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial.

[14] Cobbs' second book is based on the people and politics behind the Peace Corps, and discusses themes of American idealism at work during the difficult realities of the second half of the twentieth century.

[19][20] Broken Promises: A Novel of the Civil War was published by Ballantine Books on March 29, 2011, the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter.

[28] The work is a fictional retelling of the 1863 Combahee River raid on Confederate positions during the Civil War and the role of abolitionist Harriet Tubman in that military operation.

It argues that feminism was born in the American Revolution and has driven U.S. history since, influencing not only the global expansion of women's rights, but also the abolition of slavery, the spread of industrialization, the creation of a social safety net, and the doubling of the U.S.

[34] Cobbs was a Fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution from 2010 to 2020,[35] held the 2003–2004 Fulbright Distinguished Professorship at University College Dublin, Ireland, the 1997 Bernath Lecture Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), a 1993 Fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington, D.C.,[35] and the 1989 Allan Nevins Prize from Society of American Historians for Best Dissertation on U.S. History: The Rich Neighbor Policy.