Tribute to Lloyd Ambrosius

The following is a tribute to Lloyd Ambrosius (1941-2024) by Dr. Jeannette Eileen Jones, who will be chairing the panel “Lloyd Ambrosius and His Historical Legacies” at the 2026 meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Philadelphia. The panel, solicited by SHGAPE, reflects upon and commemorates the tremendous accomplishments and broad impact of Lloyd Ambrosius, a leading expert on Woodrow Wilson and Wilsonian statecraft.

SEX RADICAL: A New Film About a Woman Who Battled the Comstock Regime

Historians of the Gilded Age are certainly familiar with the nefarious deeds of the evangelical “vice-hunter,” Anthony Comstock, but they may not know the story of Ida Craddock, a sex educator, scholar, and sexual mystic who challenged Comstock face-to-face, and who inspired her contemporaries by her courage. SEX RADICAL, the latest film from award-winning writer/director Andy Kirshner tells Craddock’s remarkable story. It will premiere at the end of this month, both theatrically and online.

Minding the GAPE – September 2025

Bowling and women’s rights, public history at the Gilded Age mansions of Newport, playing with fire in turn-of-the-century New York City, the long history of political violence in the U.S., the return of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, and much more

Minding the GAPE – July 2025

Spun-glass fabrics, Robert La Follette, convict labor in Florida’s swamps, dying before germ theory, the “pansy craze,” the legacy of the Scopes “Monkey Trial” 100 years later, and much more.

CFP: SHGAPE Conference

The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is delighted to host its first stand-alone conference, June 4-6, 2026, at Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois. We welcome anyone interested in US history from Reconstruction through the 1920s, including scholars from a range of fields, public historians, archivists, and teachers, to come, meet, and exchange ideas.

Minding the GAPE – June 2025

Juneteenth historic sites, “female husbands,” a ghost fleet in the Potomac, the “convict clause” and the Panama Canal, the 19th-century origins of criminalizing abortion, a brief history of miasma theory, “human zoos,” and much more.

Minding the GAPE – May 2025

“Wellness farms” and the eugenic history of confining young people with disability, how the U.S.-Canada border was shaped, parallels between the SAVE Act and the 1907 Expatriation Act, the real history behind the film “Sinners,” the historical significance of Pope Leo XIV’s name choice, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – April 2025

Tariffs and the income tax in historical perspective, the origins of the White House Easter Egg Roll, HBCU marching bands, epidemics and disability, primary sources from mass persuasion campaigns, why we regulate raw milk, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – March 2025

Golden Age or new Gilded Age, the Statue of Liberty, a historian’s family history, pedestrianism and politics, documenting Black dance history, the Teddy Bear’s failed possum rival, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – February 2025

The life of Black feminist activist Dr. Anna Julia Cooper, a covert government agency in the Progressive Era, coercive tariffs under McKinley, marriage records of the Freedmen’s Bureau, the origins of Black financial institutions, and much more.

Wobbly Justice: Guilt by Association in Progressive-Era Seattle

On June 22, 1918, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) named Walker Smith was arrested at his home in Seattle. Two Scottish sisters, Janet and Margaret Roy, were arrested with him, and unlike Smith and the many others he consorted with, they were not American citizens. As foreigners, the sisters’ experience in the American legal system, the newspaper coverage devoted to them, and their attempts to thwart the immigration laws that targeted them provide an example of how American immigration law and practice sought to ideologically sort and control new arrivals to the United States.