In the context of the ongoing First World War that was raging elsewhere, the US purchase of the Danish West Indies—far from the Fronts—might be considered a somewhat marginal event. But as Dr. Ben Markham shows in this post, the purchase was more than simply a financial and territorial transaction. Rather, it revealed the trajectories of three different early-twentieth century empires: those of Denmark, Great Britain and the United States.
Read “Britain, the United States, and the Danish West Indies, 1916-17” here.
Time for another Minding the GAPE! In April’s roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts, read about bicycles in the city, epidemic fashion, private zoos, Triscuits, and much more.
In 1906, Atlanta experienced a race riot that led to the death of dozens of Black Atlanta residents and fundamentally reshaped Black neighborhoods and businesses. In this post, Dr. Sara Harwood discusses her experience developing a self-guided online walking tour with Georgia State University students that confronts this dark legacy. She also offers insight into the exciting digital history work happening in the Atlanta area.
Read “Teaching Digital Literacy through a Walking Tour about the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot” here.
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is delighted to announce the winners of this year’s prizes. We are only sorry that we could not honor them in person at the SHGAPE luncheon at the OAH this year. Read about the 2020 prize winners here.
The newest Minding the GAPE is here. Our March roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era blog posts and articles features historical perspectives on the pandemic and much more, including posts on magic show advertisements, dairy and colonialism, the Blues, and Madam C.J. Walker.
Say goodbye to February with the latest Minding the GAPE! In the February roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era content from around the web, read about postcards, presidential campaigns, piracy, pandemics, and more.
The recent eruption of Taal Volcano in the Philippines spurred Dr. Theresa Ventura to examine how the politics of disaster, the press, and state obligation during Taal’s 1911 eruption can inform the present. In this latest blog post, Dr. Ventura illuminates how the Philippine press responded to Taal’s deadly Progressive-Era eruption by articulating a “disaster nationalism” that criticized US colonial rule while situating Philippine experiential knowledge of the landscape as a necessary condition for governance. That the tragedy of the 1911 eruption was compounded by the disaster of colonialism shows how blurred the line between natural and human-made disaster is, an important lesson in an age of climate change.
It’s the first Minding the GAPE of the year! Read some timely pieces on Prohibition, impeachment, quarantines, and more in January’s roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web.
Close out 2019 with our latest Minding the GAPE! In December’s roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts, read about birdsong, a boom-town cemetery, and Christmas card contests.
Meet the editors of the SHGAPE blog in our latest post!
The newest “Minding the GAPE” is here. In November’s roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web, learn about the ERA, taxidermy, Thanksgiving myths, and debutante balls.
Study nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architecture, design, and the arts at one of the Victorian Society in America’s internationally acclaimed Summer Schools! Explore the roots of American modernism during our six-day Chicago program (June 11-16); visit The Breakers and McKim, Mead & White’s Isaac Bell House, gardens, historic churches, and stunning Tiffany windows on our ten-day course in Newport, Rhode Island (May 29-June 7); or spend two weeks examining nineteenth-century art, architecture, and design in London, the Midlands, and the West Country (June 27-July 12)!
Find out more about the Victorian Society in America Summer School Programs here.
Behind the demographic impact of freedpeople’s movements after the Civil War lurks a messier and more elusive question about the information networks and geographical knowledge that sustained one of the most significant internal migration movements in U.S. history. In our latest post, Dr. Keith McCall examines how planters’ labor recruitment networks and freedpeople’s kinship networks helped freedpeople collect, assess, and share the geographical information that structured routes of migration.
Read “Geographical Knowledge and Networks of Migration in the Post-Civil War South” here.
Our latest roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts is here. In October’s “Minding the GAPE,” learn about baseball, butter, Halloween, Indigenous Peoples’ Day, and more.
How were “fake physicians” or illegal forms of medical practice in early-twentieth-century New York City policed? What were women’s roles in this? Lizzie Evens helps us to answer these questions and to understand the history of medical professionalism and surveillance in her post this week about the story of detective Frances Benzecry and her work with the NYPD and New York County Medical Society.
A new “Minding the GAPE” is here. In September’s roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web, read about Hawaiian self-determination, childlessness, bubonic plague, and the Green Corn Rebellion.
In this week’s post, Dr. Tamara Venit Shelton examines the 1909 trial of Chinese American herbalist T. Wah Hing for feticide. In an era when abortion was illegal and the American Medical Association officially opposed its practice, practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine in the United States terminated unwanted pregnancies for women without recourse in mainstream medical care.
Read “T. Wah Hing, Chinese American Herbalist and Abortionist” here.
The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is delighted to announce the Wayne Morgan Prize for the best book published in political history of United States in the period 1865-1920s.
Former JGAPE editor, Alan Lessoff has written this tribute to remember Morgan’s legacy.
Our newest post tells the story of Augusta Lewis Troup, an activist, reformer, teacher, and journalist who campaigned to advance the rights of working women through labor movements and local suffrage campaigns. Through the lens of Troup’s life, Dr. Kelly Marino explores class tensions in the women’s rights movement and reveals how grassroots working women’s activism, often overlooked in the scholarship, played a crucial role in the ultimate success of the suffrage campaign.
New SHGAPE blog posts are in the works, but for now enjoy another edition of “Minding the GAPE,” a collection of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from over the past month. For August, read through love letters, learn about Alaska, and listen to “Old Town Road.”
We’re back with “Minding the GAPE,” a collection of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from over the past month. For July, read about Black suffragists, the 1920 census, reforming the Fourth of July, and more.
It’s time again for “Minding the GAPE,” a monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web. For June, we have pension files, Freud, murder, and more.
The historiographical debate over the character of Populism and its influence on American politics remains contentious. In this week’s post, Dr. Wesley Bishop shares his research on “Coxey’s Army” and what studying Jacob Coxey can reveal about Populist history and American political thought.
This is the second in our series of posts from participants in the SHGAPE-sponsored lightning round at OAH 2019.
What did Americans think of early phonographs and how did they use them? What can home sound recordings reveal about turn-of-the-century domestic life? Did sound recording technology play a role in relaxing patriarchal family relations? In our latest post, Dr. J. Martin Vest considers early home sound recordings and shares how working with this fascinating set of sources has allowed him to flesh out a fuller picture of recorded sound’s place in the Progressive Era home. Read the post here and be sure to check out the links to the recordings themselves.
This post is the first in a series of posts written by some of the participants in the SHGAPE-sponsored lightning round at OAH 2019, “The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Emerging Scholarship in the Field,” organized by Cynthia Heider.
This week’s post is our first “Minding the GAPE” post, a monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web. We’ve gathered a bunch of great reads from May covering a range of topics, from Reconstruction to raisins.
We are pleased to share our latest post, an interview with the new SHGAPE President, Dr. Albert S. Broussard. Dr. Broussard, Professor of History at Texas A&M University, shares how he came to study the history of racial equality and racial activism in the West, how he became involved in SHGAPE, how GAPE history has changed over the last few decades, and what he sees as the future of SHGAPE and the field more broadly.
Today’s newest post features a juicy Progressive Era divorce scandal! Read all about labor reformer George Gunton and the two women at the center of his love life in this post by Fordham University doctoral candidate Stephen Leccese. Stephen studies economic thought and policy during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, particularly how economists conceived the role of mass consumption in an industrial economy. He can be reached on Twitter at @srleccese.
Who was Walter Wyckoff and what did Upton Sinclair have to say about him and his work? What does examining Wyckoff’s papers in the archives tell us about masculinity, class, and the historian’s craft? Find out in this fascinating post, “‘A Place Among Original Investigators:” Walter Wyckoff, Alfred Pierce, and Me” by Beau Driver.
Beau is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he will defend his dissertation, “The Worker: Walter Wyckoff and His Experiment in Reality,” this spring. Beau is also a co-founder of Erstwhile Blog, a blog created and managed by history graduate students from CU.
Today’s newest post on the SHGAPE blog is about “The Greatest Show on Earth!” Read here about the complexities of the American circus in the Gilded Age by William J. Hansard. Hansard is a Ph.D. student in the Transatlantic History program at the University of Texas at Arlington.
We’re pleased to feature an excellent new post on race, Franco-Americans, and immigration by Dr. Patrick Lacroix. Lacroix is an instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy (Exeter, N.H.). His work on Franco-Americans has appeared in numerous publications, including the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He tweets from @querythepast.
Today, we are pleased to link to the latest issue and editors’ note for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era over on the Latest Journal Issue page! Editors C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa and Boyd Cothran pull together for readers a series of fascinating articles in the January issue (Volume 18.1). Enjoy!
The 2019 annual meeting for the American Historical Association will take place in Chicago from January 3-6, and SHGAPE is sponsoring two great panels! Today on the blog we’re pleased to feature a “sneak peek” of one of the sponsored sessions, “Secret Liaisons and Disloyalty: Space and Gender in Progressive-Era New York.” The panel is scheduled for Thursday, January 3 from 1:30-3:00 P.M. at the Palmer House Hilton, Salon 12, and is chaired by Timothy J. Gilfoyle (Loyola University, Chicago), featuring papers by Motoe Sasaki (Hosei University), Heather Ruth Lee (New York University), Rachel Hui-Chi Hsu (Johns Hopkins University), and Aaron Welt (New York University), with comments provided by Daniel Bender (University of Toronto). Special thanks to Motoe Sasaki for contributing this post: A Sneak Peek at One of the SHGAPE-Sponsored Panels at the 2019 AHA!
Call for Bloggers!
Calling all scholars working on the years between 1865 and 1920! Have some fascinating research or an unknown story from the archives to share? An experience in the classroom or a new exhibit that you’ve worked on? We’re looking for blog posts from you! We’d love to have posts from independent scholars, public historians, graduate students, teachers, and professors on a wide range of topics. We’re especially looking for posts on borderlands, race and ethnic studies, migration, gender, sexuality, and intersectional histories, but all topics and approaches are welcome. Undergraduates are welcome to submit posts for publication consideration and instructors may submit collective posts. The new SHGAPE Blog (part of the website for the Society of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era) attracts a broad public audience and we can’t wait to feature your work!
Contact Lauren MacIvor Thompson, Georgia State University at lmacivor1@gsu.edu with your pitch!
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Valedictory note
Kristin Hoganson, President, Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Looking back at the last five years of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, it seems that although the outgoing co-editors, Robert D. Johnston and Benjamin H. Johnson, have published plenty of Gilded Age content, their term as editors has been a thoroughly progressive era.
Their first issue, in Jan. 2015, brought Jay-Z to the pages of JGAPE. That spirit of innovation has carried forward to this, their last issue. While following in their predecessors’ footsteps in the basic format of the journal, the high standards for scholarly excellence, the inclusion of a wide range of work, and the occasional themed issue with guest editorial assistance, Robert and Ben have also introduced several new features.
Venturing beyond the core of the journal – the articles chosen from the submissions that landed on their desks (or laptops) and the book reviews ably edited by Elaine Frantz — Ben and Robert arranged a historiographical intervention feature, aimed at reflecting on classic books. They orchestrated special fora, including one on Indigenous histories that launched its guest editors, Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, on the journey that has now placed them at the helm of JGAPE as Robert and Ben’s successors. They launched special issues, roundtables, a primary source reflection, and a feature labeled “Public Commemoration” that featured a critical assessment of The Birth of a Nation a century after its release. As debates over migration, borders, and diversity played out in headlines and news feeds, with significant consequences on the ground, they published a forum on immigration, structured as a conversation among six historians of migration and borders.
Their commitment to teaching – and to valuing the particular expertises of teachers – has been palpable in the pages of JGAPE. Among the prompts for the forum on immigration were questions on teaching immigration history in a tense political environment. In the Jan 2015 issue, they published an essay on teaching The Great Gatsby in the high school classroom by a high school teacher who wrote from experience. The “teaching forum” on John Green’s “Crash Course US History” videos also merits note, as do the fora on the revised Advanced Placement U.S. History exam and the Reacting to the Past educational games.
Editing can be persnickety, meticulous work, but editing a journal such as JGAPE also requires the ability to think widely and imaginatively, to see the potential in novel, half-baked ideas, and to grasp the importance of new lines of thought. Robert and Ben have excelled not only in the hedgehog aspects of editing, but also in the fox-like parts of the job. And they have consistently done so with an eye on the larger stakes of historical research and the connections between the years encompassed by the journal and our own time.
Their editorial voice has come across not only in the journal’s tables of contents but also in the introductions they have written for each issue. These have done more than signpost what lies ahead; they have also reflected on the meaning of the past for the present. As their comments on Woodrow Wilson’s legacy, the labor movement, electoral politics, and recent Klan activity suggest, they saw their work as editors as a way to sharpen our understanding of the world we live in today. They have invited readers to continue the conversation, signaling that they meant it by providing email addresses.
Shortly after assuming the editorship, they wrote of their hope that the journal would speak “in a multivoiced register, eschewing respectability when necessary and taking seriously all kinds of scholarship, sources, and seemingly strange subjects.” (Editors’ note, April 2015). Although they never really managed to ditch respectability, they did expose their readers to a whole chorus of voices. And even as they strove to jazz things up, clearly delighting in fresh approaches and intellectual discovery, they also took the enterprise seriously, as the best of editors do. Knowing that our work matters, they never lost sight of the importance of their own.
The care they haven taken in soliciting peer reviewers, the attention they have given to honing arguments and prose, the thought they have put into producing each issue can be seen on every page they edited. On behalf of SHGAPE and the many readers who have turned to JGAPE to better understand the backstory to the present, thank you and well done.
The Weather Channel and weather apps like Accuweather are a new medium for an old method. Today’s post features Dr. Jamie Pietruska’s fascinating backstory to the business of weather prediction – a timely read for the current hurricane season!
SHGAPE member Christopher Nichols, Associate Professor of History at Oregon State University, has a wonderful TED talk out on American isolationism.
“In a country today that feels more divided than ever, what better time to look beyond our immediate reactions and dig deeper? To search our past for greater understanding? In this masterful Talk, Christopher Nichols PhD, dives into the origins of America Isolationism and “America First.” The parallels to today and “Make America Great Again” provokes and creates an informed debate. He passionately explains that history is a vaccine against superficiality. When we take time to unearth the full story, time to understand it, we gain a new depth of insight which can create a better tomorrow.”
Congratulations, Chris!
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August 8, 2018
This week’s exclusive web content features an intriguing post from recent University of Michigan Ph.D Jacques Martin Vest. He brings us a fascinating story from the archives of the New York Public Library on the surprises of research, the connections between the record industry and early twentieth-century material culture, and a little dog mascot named Nipper. Enjoy! On Nippers, Nipper-Napping, and the New York Public Library
Today, we’re pleased to feature the editors’ note for the July 2018 issue of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Editors C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, Boyd Cothran, Robert D. Johnston, and Benjamin H. Johnson give us a preview and smart commentary on the fascinating set of articles in Volume 17, Issue 3.
Welcome to the first installment of the featured exclusive content on the updated SHGAPE Website! We are pleased to feature our first post
The Blue and the Gray at Gettysburg, Assembly Tent, Gettysburg Celebration, Pennsylvania. Gettysburg Pennsylvania United States, ca. 1913. Photograph. Library of Congress. (https://www.loc.gov/item/93505802/).
from doctoral student Donald Thomas Hickey of the University of California, Santa Cruz on reconciliation literature after the Civil War. Hickey’s post will be the first in a series of fascinating essays by historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, giving readers an inside look on their research, archival adventures, and the untold stories from this period of history. If you have an idea for a post, please email Lauren MacIvor Thompson (lmacivor1@gsu.edu). Enjoy!
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