A monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web.
How subterranean rivers shaped our modern cities
Lowell’s boarding house mothers performed domestic labor on an industrial scale
Dragons, gnomes, and other mythical creatures in the U.S. Patent Trade Office Trademarks Collection
The short-lived history of the Freedmen’s Bureau Courts
Exploring the concept of the human aura across the centuries
Why America instituted the income tax
What the true story of Appomattox teaches us about the dangers of letting myth replace history
How government buildings prepared for summer before air conditioning
Tariffs and depressions: lessons from the 19th century
What happened to the bodies of the Titanic victims?
Podcast episode on the history of psychiatry and sexuality
In the 1920s, dreams of buried pirate treasure lured Americans to Florida
160 years later, examining the moments immediately after John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln
Tax season and building the American fiscal state
Congress and the origins of the annual White House Easter Egg Roll
A look at the humble axe through history
Folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland’s 1899 Aradia, Gospel of the Witches became a foundational text in the 20th-century neo-pagan revival
Single-family households, settler colonialism, and the gendered dimensions of Civil War commemorations in the West
In the late 1800s, HBCU marching bands paved a new and distinctly Black path for American band music
New Library of Congress primary source set for educators to introduce mass persuasion campaigns and information literacy skills
Who defines working-class identity? An intersectional analysis of Puerto Rican and Southern white women in the turn-of-the-century textile industry and beyond
Podcast episode covering the long history of epidemics as mass-disabling events
Sophie Mousseau: identifying a nameless Native girl in an 1868 photo at Fort Laramie
The Jungle, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and why we regulate raw milk
Laura Crossley is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the SHGAPE Blog. She is a history PhD candidate at George Mason University, specializing in digital history and Indigenous histories. Her dissertation examines how political debates over land, statehood, and Native sovereignty in the American West played out at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.