Making History The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Retrospective View

Charles W. Calhoun
East Carolina University

Don't let anyone tell you that grand ideas floated in animated conversation in social gatherings at history conventions never go anywhere.  The journal you hold in your hands is the ultimate result of just such a session a decade and a half ago.  The scene took place at the 1985 AHA meeting in New York, where I was relating to Jerry Sternstein of Brooklyn College an idea I had harbored for some time of organizing a new society of historians of the Gilded Age.  In 1977-1978 I had worked for a legislative history project in Indianapolis, where I watched Jim Broussard create the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) literally from nothing.  By 1986 SHEAR had been publishing the Journal of the Early Republic for half a decade.  Looking at that success, Jerry and I rhapsodized, why couldn't we do the same thing for the late nineteenth century?  A month after the meeting Jerry reported that he had raised the idea with his colleagues at Brooklyn, Ari Hoogenboom and Hans Trefousse, who "both were much interested."  Jerry suggested that we talk the idea up at the OAH meeting in New York in April.  "Perhaps," he added, "we can round up a group of Gilded Age historians, have a banquet, and discuss your proposal among other things of mutual interest."1	1
At the OAH meeting, specifically at the reception of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), Jerry and I continued our proselytizing in conversations with Andy Fry of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas and others who worked in the Gilded Age.  At that time SHAFR was well-established and had been publishing its journal, Diplomatic History, for a decade.  I remarked that my notion of organizing such a group for historians of the Gilded Age included the hope that eventually it would publish a similar journal.  After the reception, Jerry, a gastronome without equal, escorted a group of us to a magnificent restaurant in Chinatown for the promised "banquet."  As course after course arrived, each more splendid than the last, we all became increasingly convinced that the idea of a new society of historians of the Gilded Age was one whose time had come.  I wound up spending more for dinner, allowing for inflation, than I have ever spent for any other meal in my twenty-five years of convention-going.  It was worth it.	2
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