The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is pleased to announce our 2024 prize and grant winners, recently celebrated at our annual SHGAPE luncheon at OAH.
Minding the GAPE – March 2024
The Johnstown Flood, Black westerns, coal communities, corporate personhood, “Manhunt,” the “Happy Birthday” song, and more
Minding the GAPE – February 2024
The first Black-owned public hospital, the “Delsarte method” for Black women’s self-care, the material culture of Valentine’s Day, cleaning up the mess of Carnival season, a chaotic yet cost-effective sewing pattern, and much more.
Minding the GAPE – January 2024
Convict leasing, Chicago’s public art, the 40-hour workweek, dairy milk, a dinosaur in DC, Lucy Parsons, WWI propaganda and the modern media industry, and much more.
Minding the GAPE – December 2023
Preserving radio broadcasts, looking over the year’s best Black history books, holiday baking with historical recipes, remembering the Christmas Truce of 1914, controversy over the Confederate memorial removal at Arlington National Cemetery, and much more.
Call for Participation: Mark Twain House and Museum Essay Series
The Mark Twain House and Museum has just launched a new program called “It Happened in Your Town.” They are inviting Connecticut teachers, students, and historical societies to provide research on their local communities in the year 1874. The museum invites SHGAPE members to put this research in a broader context for the public through a series of short essays.
Minding the GAPE – November 2023
Looking back at the histories of Armistice Day and Thanksgiving, building urban landscapes with trash, resistance through writing at Carlisle Indian School, swan boats, New York City’s rats, and much more.
Minding the GAPE – October 2023
Vampire-killing kits, log driving, urban disability history, presidential pets, Killers of the Flower Moon, 100 years of the jungle gym, “cough gum,” and much more.
Minding the GAPE – September 2023
Deadly artificial flowers, urban playgrounds, “domestic husbands,” ice cream parlor panics, horseless carriages, and much more.
Minding the GAPE – August 2023
Wildfires, Wild West shows, traveling circuses, brewing beer, beating heat waves, the lottery, and much more.
Excavating the Colonial War on D.C. Alleys in the Making of Imperial Washington
Simultaneously a symbol for the nation and a longtime major Black city without political representation, Washington, D.C., has appeared to many—in the words of blues poet Gil Scott-Heron—as “a ball of contradictions” between affluent white political elites “who come and go” and the predominantly Black poor and working-class “who’ve got to stay.” Perhaps nowhere is this entanglement better illustrated than the McMillan Plan’s Progressive Era redesign of “Imperial Washington” made possible by the racialized slum clearance of the Metropolitan Police Department’s “war on alleys” at the turn of the twentieth century.
Minding the GAPE – July 2023
Anti-suffragists, racism in western water rights, opioid addiction among Civil War veterans, double exposure photographs, icebox cakes, Kentucky cave tourism, and much more.