Part One is available here

What can we look forward to with the next issue & future of the journal?

Rosanne: Coming up in the journal, we have a lot of noise. The next issue coming out in October is a special issue on sound in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Rebecca, Tanya McKenna and David Sweetman have pulled together some really exciting research articles and articles about research, about web development, museum work on sound in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and they’ve also pulled together two teaching articles on teaching using sound in the classroom, what kinds of sources you might use – here are some examples of sources, material, culture of sound, which you’d think would be kind of odd, but it turns out it’s pretty amazing – using collections from the Smithsonian. It will be a great resource for all of us looking forward to upcoming courses, right as we want to sort of prep our courses and that issue is also going to have a really excellent roundtable table looking at one of the great books of our field, Dan Rogers Atlantic Crossings. It’s been out now for 25 years and if it is not the most cited book in JGAPE, it’s got to be close, right? Everybody uses Atlantic Crossings as a touchstone for everyone. So, I’m really grateful to Rob McGreevy for having pulled together some scholars to talk about the impact Atlantic Crossings has had on their work on the field and where we might go from there.

In January we have another special issue, we don’t usually do back-to-back special issues, but when you got them, smoke them, right, like we got to do it – these are great issues. This one is thinking about how we think about the GAPE through literature, both fiction and non-fiction and Elizabeth Shannon and Nancy Unger, former president of SHGAPE, pulled together this this special issue. Again, we have some fabulous research articles and a couple of essays on teaching Gilded Age, Progressive Era history using literature. Finally, in that issue, we also have a roundtable of scholars remembering Walter Nugent. Walter was president of SHGAPE when it was formed. He was important to the journal and to the society, but he’s also a great historian, and a fabulous human being. We’re really excited to have that that coming up in the journal too and in future issues that we’ve got lined up such as crime in the Gilded Age, a global Gilded Age and the Gilded Age, Progressive Era origins of our current climate crisis. That’s hopefully going to be a round table that’s going to be at the OAH in New Orleans in 2024. So, if anyone hears that and hears this and is going to be at the OAH go, because it’s going to be a great roundtable. So that’s what we have, on the immediate future along with research articles that are heading into production soon, it’s exciting.

Brian: We’ve been proofing a lot of those things that are coming out soon the special issue on sound, the roundtable on Atlantic Crossings. It’s been fun reading those before they’re even out. What I want to do is continue the good balance that the journal has now. We’re not a journal that like Rosanne said, that turns every issue into a special issue. I think sometimes that can get a little bit overwhelming for readers but when we’ve got a great topic, we do that. I’m thinking of a few years ago there was a really great special issue on food studies and nutrition, and that came at just the perfect time because I had a graduate student who was interested in food studies taking my Gilded Age Progressive Era graduate seminar, and that really shaped her thesis. I’m thinking that’s a really good thing for us to continue doing, and especially if it’s around special issues on things that are really relevant to us now, like climate change, globalisation. I’m really interested maybe in the next year or two having a special issue or a roundtable on the history of higher education, because right now we’re seeing a lot of crises in higher education and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is such an important time based on my own research but also, I think we would all agree it’s such an important time for the formation of a lot of present-day structures of higher education.

I really like the roundtables or reflections on classic books like Atlantic Crossings or Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order and want to continue doing that. What I’m hoping we might be able to do is talk to our editorial board and ask what classics or things they’d like us to reflect on. So it’s not just me saying, here’s a book that I read 20 years ago that I think is really important, but maybe getting some ideas from the readership and finding out what some of the things that we need to be reflecting back on and thinking about where we’ve been as a field as well as where we’re going as a field and think that we can all we can all benefit from those kind of historiographical reflections. One of the most important things we can do is publish research articles that are starting out as dissertation chapters, conference papers or chapters from people’s books so that we can see where the practitioners are taking the field – I want to keep that balance. I think earlier Rosanne mentioned the pedagogical piece on teaching LGBTQ history and that was a helpful piece to have. I just I like the idea of continuing that balance. And I’m excited about what we can do in terms of bringing in things people are interested in looking back on, some of those historiographical pieces, but also, carefully picking what are the special issues, what are the roundtables so that we are talking about things that are really important not just to us as a historical society or as historians, but also to American society and where we’re at right now.

What are you most looking forward to about working on the journal?

Brian: I’m really looking forward to working with authors, seeing what kinds of ideas people are coming up with and I’m interested in working with the leadership of the society to identify the important things that we need to be talking about. So, I mean, I’m a bit of a weirdo in the sense that actually I kind of oddly look forward to page proofs. I really enjoy reading things and catching the little bitty errors that sneak in here and there. But probably the most the thing I’m most excited about is the big picture, helping people frame their work and improve their work and thinking about what are the topics that we need to be talking about for as broad as the journal can be in this era. There may be more topics we need to be talking about and I’d like to help identify those and pull those in and maybe pull more people into the society and into the journal as well.

Rosanne: I think there’s so much potential for continued growth of the journal, there is so much excitement in the field. I think of people who are working in diverse corners or centres of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and it is really a delight to get the little ding from scholar when saying a new article has been submitted. It’s great and I’m very much looking forward to working with Brian because it will be so exciting to see the kinds of projects that he starts and even more exciting to see them come into fruition over the next few years. It’s very nice to know the journal is in good hands and it will continue the trajectory that it’s been on, which is a wonderful one.

Brian: This is a really good journal. It’s been around for 20 years or so, and I don’t want to radically change it, I want to continue to improve it. I think it’s been getting better all the time and I’m really excited about seeing where I can continue that growth and maintain the strengths of the journal.

Rosanne: To add to that it has been, for me at least, a real pleasure working with Cambridge University Press who have been very supportive of the kinds of initiatives that we’ve put forward. They’re really supportive of our round tables, but also of adding additional material, ancillary material to the journal and the digital format. They’ve been really willing to promote the journal, especially when we did these two great roundtables on the 1918, 1919 flu pandemic thinking, rethinking it, revisiting it in the age of COVID and the Press was excellent at really promoting those widely and they have been used widely. They were used in in news reports, lots of journalists tapped into them, lots of students have read them. That kind of fast response from the Press and really willingness to support the journal has been great.

Any final thoughts?

Brian: I’m really excited about working with the journal and seeing where it goes. I’ve got my ideas about what we can do, but I also know there’s a lot of other people out there probably smarter than me who are going to have even better ideas. I to listen to those people and see how we can continue to take what’s a really, really great journal for a really great society and continue to make it an even better journal, an even better venue for the scholarship in this really exciting field.