Susie May Ames

After she graduated from Randolph-Macon, Ames taught in public schools. She began teaching at Crewe High School in Nottoway County, in south central Virginia, then was principal of Harborton High School in Accomack County from 1909 to 1911.[1] From 1911 and 1916, Ames taught at high schools in Indiana, Maryland, and at the Eastern Kentucky Normal School (now Eastern Kentucky University).[1] She returned to the Eastern Shore in 1916, and taught at Franktown-Nassawadox High School, became principal of Pungoteague High School in 1917, and served on the faculty of E.C. Glass High School in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1920 to 1923.[1]

Teaching at the high school level was highest level commonly open to women in the early twentieth century. Ames, however, had ambitions to teach at higher levels, and began graduate coursework in English in summer 1915 at the University of Chicago.[1] She also took history courses through the University of California in 1923. In the fall of 1923, Ames was appointed as an instructor in history at Randolph-Macon Women's College, where she taught for the rest of her career.[1]

In After joining the faculty, Ames continued to pursue her graduate studies, enrolling at Columbia University. She received a master's degree in 1926. A scholarship in 1927 allowed her to travel in Europe.[1] She studied with Evarts Boutell Greene, the first De Witt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University/[1] Ames published her first major article in the Journal of Economic and Business History in 1931.[2] She was also interested in the Civil War on the Eastern Shore, and conducted interviews of local residents to collect memories of the war.[1]

Ames earned her PhD in 1940.[1] Her dissertation, "Studies of the Virginia Eastern Shore in the Seventeenth Century", was a landmark social and economic history based on analysis of the earliest county court records in the United States.[1]

Ames' work in the early 1940s reflected the anxieties of World War II. She worked on an investigation of Edmund Scarburgh, one of Accomack County's early chief magistrates, who was known for his aggression.[1] Scarburgh's aggressive behaviors led to Jamestown authorities merging Northampton and Accomack Counties in 1670 and then to separate them two and a half years later after Scarburgh's death.[3] Ames wrote about this issue in "The Reunion of Two Virginia Counties" in the Journal of Southern History.[3] In the 1950s, issues of civil rights inspired her to examine federal policy towards the Eastern Shore in the Civil War.[4] In 1944, she was appointed to the Virginia World War II History Commission, to help the state document the conflict.[1]

Ames' best-known work was her edited volume County Court Records of Accomack-Northampton, Virginia, 1632-1640. She began work on this volume in February 1941, and it was published in 1954 by the American Historical Association as volumen 7 of the American Legal records series.[1] She continued to work on the Eastern Shore, and was most interested in "Law-in-Action," rather than in colonial adoption of English law.[1] Her work on the Eastern Shore was credited as foundational by later historians T.H. Breen and Stephen Innes.[5]

Ames was a member of numerous professional associations, contributed and reviewed for many journals. Unfortunately, like many other female academics in the South, she was often barred from the meetings of these associations. Consequently, many of her ideas were first presented to women's clubs and in other, less formal spaces. She interacted with her colleagues at Columbia, but had little contact with other historians at colleges and universities in Virginia, which were generally less open to female scholars than northern universities.[1]