A monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web.
Considering Indigenous presence and memoryscapes at public history sites
These coffeehouses embrace their historic locations
New research guide for James Reese Europe—musician, composer, director, and union organizer
The 2025 Met Gala theme paid homage to 250 years of Black men’s fashion
Helping students see the connection between the economy and the environment with a 1909 political cartoon
Teaching exercise analyzing logical reasoning in primary sources on women’s suffrage
Historical precedents for RFK’s “wellness farms” idea and the eugenic principles behind them
The U.S.-Canada border is not “artificial” but was shaped by a series of treaties from 1783-1925
In 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first African American woman to earn a pilot’s license—her life and legacy
Following the success of Sinners, a look at the real history of how Chinese and Black Americans wrestled with life under Jim Crow
Reflections on Global Black Thought, a new journal devoted to the study of the Black intellectual tradition.
Test your knowledge of birthright citizenship with this quiz from NPR
A cultural history of the “axe murder”
Malcolm X was born 100 years ago
The SAVE Act echoes the 1907 Expatriation Act, which stripped American women of their citizenship when they married non-citizens and exposed how nativist policies could harm the rights of American-born women as well as immigrants
L.A.’s Little Tokyo’s storied history began as an ethnic enclave in the early 1900s
Recent historiographical developments in sensory history
Memorial Day’s origins as Decoration Day
How the assassination of President James Garfield gave rise to the modern federal civil service
The life of Major R. R. Wright, founder of the African American bank Citizens & Southern Banking Company of Philadelphia
Highlights from the “Letters Received by the Office of Indian Affairs, 1824–1880” series from the National Archives
Over a century of fires and landscape manipulation in Los Angeles
The devastating consequences of widespread anonymous baby relinquishment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
What Pope Leo XIV’s name choice might signify, as he becomes the first pope to take this name since Leo XIII, who led the Church from 1878 to 1903
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.