Please introduce yourself.

Rosanne Currarino: I am a co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and I’ve been on the editorial team since January 2020. I grew up in Texas, where the American side of my family has lived since before the Gilded Age, but I went to school in the Northeast, and I’ve spent my career teaching American history to Canadians.

Brian Ingrassia: I’m also co-editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, having just recently joined. I’m originally from central Illinois with at least one wing of my family arriving firmly in the progressive era. I went to a small college in central Illinois, one of the first people in my family to go to college, did my PhD at the University of Illinois, and I’ve been bouncing around what I guess we might call the Sun Belt for most of my career, teaching American history to people in Georgia, Atlanta specifically outside of Nashville for a few years. Now I’m at a place called West Texas A&M University, which is just outside of Amarillo, Texas.

Tell us a bit about your background and your research.

Rosanne: I am particularly interested in how Americans thought about the economic and social changes wrought by industrialisation and incorporation in the Gilded Age and Progressive era. The first book I did looked at the labour question; how Americans thought about work and production in an era of mass production and mass consumption. My current project uses California’s early orange growers, these are the folks who go on to create what becomes Sunkist, to think about how regular capitalists dealt with an increasingly corporate business landscape. I’ve really loved working with the orange growers because they embody much of what I love about the GAPE. You never know what they’re going to do next.

Brian: I started out at graduate school, I was planning to do antebellum intellectual history, specifically higher education history. Then I got to the University of Illinois where a lot of people were doing late 19th, early 20th century stuff, especially labour history, and really kind of got sucked into that period. I’ve really enjoyed my work. My first book is on the history of higher education, specifically about college football and progressive era football reform and a lot of people think of me as a sport historian, but I really wanted to be a historian of higher education. When you write a book on the history of college football, people decide that you must be a sport historian. I have moved in that direction, but I’m still very firmly interested in things that look at how society embraces popular culture, including sport. A lot of my current work deals with the Progressive era Good Roads movement and the emergence of Automobility and my second book is going to be coming out soon. It’s on the early history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It’s also in some ways dealing with the history of capitalism, but probably in a different kind of way than what Rosanne’s doing in her research, but kind of looking at how the some of the early historian promoters of auto racing were capitalists who were kind of using popular culture to promote the technologies they were building, but also the usage of those technologies.

What excites you about being the editor of JGAPE & what sparked your interest in the journal?

Rosanne: One of the things that I love about the journal and one of the reasons that I was so excited to be part of the journal, an excited reader of the Journal for years before as well, is the extraordinary breadth and depth of JGAPE. It might seem kind of paradoxical because the journal only deals with a small time, around 1865 to 1920 or so, but because we have such a small time period, relatively speaking, Europeanists would tell us, please, that’s all you deal with. But because of that, the Journal has an incredible range of topics that it publishes on and it goes into those topics and fields and questions in great depth. And this is really has been quite exciting. Even in the first volume in 2002, there were articles on political and economic history, on women’s history, on gender history, on labour history, urban history, religion, African-American history, legal history. I mean, it is just so amazing the breadth of research that the journal has published and now thanks in no small part to the work of Boyd Cothran, previous editor of the Journal, we’re now getting more and more submissions and publishing more articles from Indigenous scholars on Indigenous history. This coming year, for instance, will be publishing the 2021 graduate student essay winner Zeta Ballou, who wrote a really great article on the Indian side of the question, settling the story of Potawatomi removal in the 20th century Midwest, and it’s really fabulous. I’m just so happy that we’re expanding even further. We’ve done some additional work recently in queer history, including publishing a great teaching essay on teaching the Queer History of the Gilded Age and Progressive era. The journal is ever evolving and ever changing, even while it’s building on its long existing strengths and it is just so much fun to work with. But it’s also fun because we’ve got great book reviews, they’re longer than your regular book review. Teaching has long been an interest of the journal and we publish great essays on teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and they have saved me many times the night before, maybe even the morning of a class. The very first issue of the Journal in 2002, Walter Nugent, who was then president of SHGAPE, talked about the sort of amazing colour and vivacity of the Gilded Age. And he wanted to say that that colour you want hope, that colour would infuse every issue of this new endeavour and think it really does so. I’m excited that the Journal is now moving into a new a new era with a new editor, it’s going to be great.

Brian: I’m going to echo a lot of those things that Rosanne said, in the sense that this period even though it is relatively brief – what, 60 or 70 years – there are so many different topics that we can talk about. I’ve been really excited to see the rise of more articles on Native American history.

I have a long history with this journal, when one of the first articles I ever submitted as a graduate student was to this journal and it was something that I had submitted to another journal, it took them five months to give me a rejection. I turned around, changed it a little bit, sent it to the Journal of the Gilded Age, Progressive Era, and Alan Lecerf, who was the editor at the time, took three days to respond to me and say, “Well, we probably can’t use it exactly the way it is now, but if you change it a little bit, maybe kind of reframe it around this idea, maybe it’s something we’d be interested in”. And I did that, it took me about 9 or 10 months and I sent it in and it got through revise and resubmit. It eventually got published in the very first issue published by Cambridge University Press in 2011. It was funny, later Alan was like, “Wow, that was such a good idea for a journal” and I said, “Alan, it was partly your idea”.

I have a significant amount of editing experience. I added a monograph series at the University of Tennessee Press on Sport History, but one of the things I really enjoy is working with authors and helping them frame articles and improve articles and improve their writing. So, I’m really excited about doing that, I’m excited about working with first time authors, continuing the strength of the journal and also building on some of those strengths with a lot of my background in the history of popular culture and higher education. Those are some of the topics I’m kind of hoping to bring into the journal. Like Rosanne said, the book review section I think is a really good strength of this journal. When I teach my historical methods course pretty frequently, this is the journal where I hand my students the book review section from the most recent issue and say, write your book reviews like this where you talk about sources and argument and intervention. I really want to see just kind of across the board those strengths continue as we continue to kind of bring more people into the society and bring more topics and things into the journal itself.

Rosanne: One of the things that I think is great about this journal – and this is something that started with the first editor, Maureen Flanagan. Alan Leithoff, as Brian just explained, continued this. Ben Johnson, Robert Johnston, Boyd Cochran, myself, and I know that this is going to continue with Brian, is that we’re really willing to do a lot of work over a long time with an author on an essay. So with some journals you revise and resubmit once and that’s the end of it. It does happen or it doesn’t happen. End of story. We’re willing to really work over a number of revisions, and we have published even recently, articles that started out as great ideas but maybe needed some work. They’ve gone through 3 or 4 revisions, and they’ve come out as fantastic contributions to the field. This is something that I think really does distinguish us, that we are willing to work over a long period of time with authors to really make something shine.

Brian: One of my first experiences was with Alan and the Journal of the Gilded Age Progressive Era. I was so used to an editor who stepped in and I realised I kind of gotten spoilt working with JGAPE. I want to continue that, that sense of cultivating and building and working with authors to make really, really good articles. I have a long history with the journal, a number of years ago is I was on the committee that that got to read two years’ worth of articles and pick the best article out of that two year period. It was amazing seeing the quality and the breadth of articles, there were great pieces on African American history. There was one on the Jubilee Singers that I remember out of Fisk University, an article on what weather prediction and probability and more. I think that was the one that ended up winning our award, but it was so hard because out of those two years’ worth of journals, eight issues total, we had so many good contenders that it was hard, to only pick one article.

Rosanne: Yeah, we are lucky to have an embarrassment of riches. Truly. It is a privilege and a delight.

Continue to part two here