A monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web.
Coffee and chocolate stats and ads in the Coffee and Tea Trade Journal
The intellectual production and embodied resistance of Mary Church Terrell, a Black clubwoman and prolific writer of the Jim Crow era
Examining the spectacle and legacy of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” a century later
Marginal notes from Teddy Roosevelt over East Asian diplomacy
Finding “back to school” images in the collections of the Library of Congress
Remembering the Scopes Trial through theater and film
How the Montgomerys, a formerly enslaved family, bought Jefferson Davis’s plantation after the Civil War
A group representing descendants of Confederate veterans is suing over a Georgia state park’s exhibit on slavery, segregation, and white supremacy
Past SHGAPE president Nancy C. Unger on Robert La Follette’s progressive legacy
Controversy over convict labor in Florida’s swamps 100 years before “Alligator Alcatraz”
Passing, Black intellectual history, race science, and more in Martha S. Jones’s new family memoir
Travel diaries of a ship stewardess in the 1890s
The “pansy craze” of the 1920s: when LGBTQ+ culture burst into mainstream American entertainment
Experiences of illness and death before germ theory
Placing the Militia Act of 1903 in historical context, as Donald Trump claims the measure empowers him to define what constitutes an invasion
The dazzling history of spun-glass fabrics
George Lunn, the socialist mayor of Schenectady who came 100 years before Zohran Mamdani
Black women’s intellectual activism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
Promoting U.S. tea consumption in the 1925 issues of the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal
Laura Crossley is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the SHGAPE Blog. She received her PhD in history from George Mason University, where she specialized 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.