Welcome to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Walter Nugent
President, SHGAPE

Scholars and others whose principal professional interest is in American history from the Civil War to the Great Depression will be the core constituency of this journal.  They need no persuading that the period was critically important in American development.  People with more general interests, including scholars who focus on other periods or fields, deserve some explanation of why we think it should have its own journal. I'll speak first to substance, then to style, and finally to need.	1
As for the substantive importance of these six decades in American history, many one-time undergraduates will recall the aphorism that the United States was born in the country but grew up in the city.  Most students, young or old, are aware that in the sheer statistical sense, the shift from four out of five Americans living on farms or in country villages, to a majority living in cities, happened between 1865 and the 1920s.  The concurrent movements from economic and diplomatic pawn in the world, or at best knight, to queen; or from "no one reads an American book" to the mature literature of the early twentieth century; from the weak presidency to the strong; from mid-nineteenth-century standards of literacy, sanitation, life expectancy, and even dress and diet to recognizably modern ones; all these and many more changes intertwine in this unique period and present the most intriguing and challenging confusions of cause and effect.	2
Immigrants arrived in unprecedented numbers and from unfamiliar sources.  Minorities already here, black or red, gained freedoms (emancipation, assimilation) that were superficial and incomplete.  Women struggled for, and gained, the right to vote.  Progress, needless to say, was not perfect by the end of the "progressive" era.  But why wasn't it, and what did change?  Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era grapple with matters such as these—hardly an exhaustive list.	3
In the sixty years following the Civil War, the tradition of farm and family formation on frontiers flourished as never before, but finally spent itself on the Great Plains in the 1920s.  Simultaneously the urban ways of life confined in 1865 to the eastern seaboard created metropolises, first in the Midwest and by 1920 in California, and spread as well to scores of smaller cities in every region—including, by then, the South.  The conjuncture in lifestyles, economies, and everything else, of traditional rural with modern urban, make this period supremely instructive.  We think it is worth studying and writing about.  We intend that this new Journal will provide writers and scholars with a place for their work, and readers and students with a place to learn, and to enjoy doing so.	4
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