In addition to holding the Council Business meeting and the Editorial Board meeting for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, SHGAPE organized several events at the Organization of American Historians annual conference (April 16-19).
2026 SHGAPE Conference: Interview with Conference Chair Amy Louise Wood
SHGAPE is holding its first standalone conference from June 4-6 in Chicago. We are pleased to present an interview with the conference committee chair, Dr. Amy Louise Wood, who shares context for the decision to hold the conference and provides further details on what attendees can expect. Registration for the conference is currently open on the main SHGAPE website.
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.
Coxey’s Army of 1894 and the State of Populist Studies
Jeffrey Ostler once stated that the contentious field of Populist studies was, “one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography.” The historiographical debate over Populism is, to say the least, long and nuanced. Historians as different as Richard Hofstadter, Walter Nugent, Lawrence Goodwyn, Elizabeth Sanders, Michael Kazin, John Judis, Jan-Werner Muller, Charles Postel, and Omar H. Ali (to name just a few) have all found different ways to interpret Populist movement of the nineteenth century and populism more generally. Yet what is particularly fascinating about the subject of Populism is that despite this considerable amount of scholarship, historians disagree over the most basic definitions and characterizations of Populism.
Listening to the Progressive Era Domestic Soundscape
In my doctoral dissertation “Vox Machinae: Phonographs and the Birth of Sonic Modernity, 1877-1930,” I presented a cultural history of the early recording industry in close conversation with the so-called “New Materialisms.” Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), phenomenological philosophy, and other strains of materialist literature, I sought to make sense of the ways in which machines and other material entities exercise agency over cultural processes. How, in other words, did the early phonograph itself—with its motor and governor and nuts and bolts and belts—shape how people responded to recorded sound?