The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is delighted to announce the appointment of Boyd Cothran of York University and Joseph Genetin-Pilawa of George Mason University as the new co-editors of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This appointment follows an international search for a successor to our current editorial team, Benjamin Johnson of Loyola University, Chicago; and Robert D. Johnston, of the University of Illinois at Chicago, who have edited the journal since 2013.
Since its founding in 2000, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has benefited from dedicated and visionary editorial leadership. Ben and Robert have shaped the journal and the larger field through their tireless work, considered judgment, and expansive sense of possibility. Theirs will be hard shoes to fill—or weighty editorial pens to hold in hand—but once again, SHGAPE has been fortunate to sign on such energetic and able editors to carry the work of the journal forward.
Executive Secretary Amy Wood (Illinois State University) chaired the search committee. I would like to thank her and committee members Albert S. Broussard (Texas A&M University), Stacy Cordery (Iowa State University), Greg Downs (University of California, Davis), and Michele Mitchell (New York University) for their careful deliberations. Additional thanks are due to all those who expressed their willingness to serve SHGAPE by applying for the position.
Boyd Cothran and Joseph Genetin-Pilawa have editorial experience at the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, having co-edited a special forum on Indigenous histories of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for the journal's October 2015 issue. In addition to their prior editorial experience, they each bring impressive scholarly records to their new positions as co-editors.
Cothran's primary areas of research and teaching interest include the post-Civil War era and the Gilded Age, with an emphasis on the cultural and military history of the West. He is the author of Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (University of North Carolina Press, 2014), which examines representations of California's last Indian war, the Modoc War (1872–1873). Cothran situates this conflict within the context of rapidly expanding cultural and commercial marketplaces to show how settlers created and sold narratives of the conflict that portrayed indigenous people as the instigators of violence and white Americans as innocent victims. The book received the 2015 Robert M. Utley Prize for the best book in military history from the Western History Association. Cothran's current research also connects U.S. Indigenous history with larger themes in American history. Cothran looks through the lens of a single year—1873—to explore doubts about the capacity of a powerful and technocratically sophisticated federal government to solve the problems of the nation. Having written for The New York Times, Indian Country Today, and other venues, Cothran brings both academic and public history experience to his new post.
Joseph Genetin-Pilawa is the author of Crooked Paths to Allotment: The Fight over Federal Indian Policy after the Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). In it, he challenges standard narratives of late nineteenth-century federal Indian policy development by focusing on Native reformers and their white allies who opposed assimilation and dispossession. Genetin-Pilawa traces some of the foundations of later Progressive Era reform to the Office of Indian Affairs in the 1870s and 1880s, which became a meeting ground for ideas about the state and its relationship to U.S. citizens and wards. His current book project, The Indians’ Capital City: Native Histories of Washington D.C., examines the visual, symbolic, and lived Indigenous landscapes of the capital, with particular attention to the ways that Native visitors and residents claimed and reclaimed spaces in the city. His articles have appeared in the Journal of Women's History, Western Historical Quarterly, Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and several edited collections, as well as The New York Times and We're History. His prior editorial experience includes co-editorship of Beyond Two Worlds: Critical Conversations on Language and Power in Native North America (SUNY Press, 2014). He has also lent his expertise to the journal through recent service on its editorial board.
Cothran and Genetin-Pilawa will be joined at the helm by review editor Elaine Frantz (Kent State University), who is continuing in that position. A historian of violence and culture, Frantz is the author of Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (University of North Carolina Press, 2015), which won the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians, and Manhood Lost: Fallen Drunkards and Redeeming Women in the Nineteenth Century United States (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
The new editorial team will build on the strong foundations laid by their predecessors. In a statement of goals for the journal, Cothran and Genetin-Pilawa noted that “As a temporally delineated journal, JGAPE is ideally positioned to reflect upon and respond to new directions in the field. From its traditional strengths in political, economic, gender, and social history, the journal has in recent years, under the guidance of Ben Johnson and Robert Johnston expanded to include many articles and forums on the history of American imperialism, Native American and Indigenous history, the United States and the world, the history of science and technology, and the history of capitalism. The journal has also maintained its tradition of historiographical self-reflection, so firmly built by earlier editors Alan Lessoff and Maureen Flanagan. We believe that the journal should remain an open forum for scholars working on a wide variety of topics and that it should continue to highlight new directions and respond to critiques of the field from within the discipline of history and beyond.”
Cothran and Genetin-Pilawa's terms as co-editors, serving alongside Benjamin Johnson and Robert Johnston, begins with this issue. To ensure a smooth transition, the outgoing and incoming editorial terms will work together for the next year, with the full transition taking effect in October 2018. New manuscripts can be submitted via email in Word format to . Those interested reviewing books for JGAPE should send a short CV and statement of current interests to Frantz at .
