Minding the GAPE – May 2023

Preserving Chinatowns, combatting food price-fixing, examining the roots of Memorial Day, mapping the Titanic shipwreck, attempting to protect migratory birds, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – April 2023

Easter hats, carrier pigeons, child labor laws, the Comstock Act, the long history of removing Black lawmakers from office, a Gilded Age murder mystery, and much more.

Regulating Freedom in Georgia’s County Court

During the two centuries before 1865, the U.S. South was governed by and for slaveholding planters. Southern law gave these enslavers almost total authority over the lives of enslaved people. The Civil War, however, destroyed the legal institution of slavery and, with it, the legal power of the slaveholder. Southern states faced the question of how to maintain the cotton economy without slavery. Their solution was to transfer the legal power over Black Southerners that had been held by slaveholders to the state.

Minding the GAPE – January 2023

Newly digitized Native American newspapers, competitive typesetting, Black Civil War widows, the debt ceiling and WWI war bonds, Chew Heong v. United States, remembering the Rosewood Massacre 100 years later, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – July 2022

Policewomen surveilling abortionists, border policy and the Mexican Revolution of 1910, Queen Lili’uokalani’s struggle for self-sovereignty in Hawaii, the multicultural history of rodeo, and much more.