A monthly roundup of Gilded Age and Progressive Era news articles and blog posts from around the web.
Highlighting Library of Congress materials on the telephone 150 years after its debut at the 1876 World’s Fair
Five National Historic Trust Sites that tell stories of women’s labor
The Black feminist legacy of author, activist, and educator Charlotte L. Forten (1837-1914)
Preserving Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge’s “botanical diary” from her 1880s European tour
School and family charts: nineteenth-century tools for nurturing early reading practices and observation skills
Photographs of Hempstead Village, New York, provide a glimpse into the American landscape before mid-twentieth-century suburbanization
In a new episode of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, María E. Montoya discusses her new book on labor, capital, and industrial violence in early-twentieth-century Colorado
Conceptualizing “concrete universalism” and “individual self-determination” in the writings of Anna Julia Cooper (1858-1964)
“A Cat-astrophe” (1919) and the trend of cat-themed music after World War I
Three nineteenth-century memoirs reveal the independence—and the hazards—experienced by traveling women booksellers
Interview with photographic artist Vanessa Charlot about Black women’s photography, ethical practice, and documenting the afterlife of slavery
In 1872 New York, a horse flu outbreak spurred an animal rights crusade
Michael W. Childers joins the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast to discuss his new book arguing that millions of anonymous tourists, not just Muir or Mather, drove the transformation of Yosemite
The librarians who opened an American library in Paris and delivered books to troops during World War I
Teaching Coxey’s Army through close analysis of a primary source
Look back at the history of race in the census, as the Trump administration proposes major changes
Using Progressive-Era sources to get students thinking about the processes of annotating and amending the Constitution
Cover Image
“The Mangold Harvest,” P.H. Emerson, 1887. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Andrew Varsanyi is a doctoral candidate in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His forthcoming dissertation explores transnational populism and agrarian political movements in North America, analyzing cross-border connections between U.S. and Canadian farmers. He has taught history at Mount Royal University and the University of Calgary.
Laura Crossley is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the SHGAPE Blog. She received her PhD in history from George Mason University, specializing in Indigenous histories and digital history. Her research examines how political debates over land, statehood, and Native sovereignty in the American West played out at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition.