The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era published a roundtable called "What Came Next?: Reflections on the Aftermath(s) of the 1918-19 Flu Pandemic in the Age of COVID." Three of the participants join me to discuss how pandemics end, if they end, what lessons they teach (if any), and how they contribute to the history of a given era. The answers might surprise you!Essential Reading:Christopher McKnight Nichols, E. Thomas Ewing, K. Healan Gaston, Maddalena Marinari, Alan Lessoff, and David Huyssen, "What Came Next?: Reflections on the Aftermath(s) of the 1918-19 Flu Pandemic in the Age of COVID," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 21, no. 2 (April 2022): 111-149.Roundtable with Christopher McKnight Nichols, Nancy Bristow, E. Thomas Ewing, Joseph M. Gabriel, Benjamin C. Montoya and Elizabeth Outka “Reconsidering the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic in the Age of COVID-19”Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era19, no. 4: 642-672.

The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) is one of the most important African American Churches in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and Christina Dickerson-Cousin shares how the AME worked in Indian Territory. The story is one of shared issues and common interests that helps add nuance to our understanding of the period.Essential Reading:Christina Dickerson-Cousin, Black Indians & Freedmen: The African Methodist Episcopal Church and Indigenous Americans, 1816-1916 (2021).

The United States and Brazil share the distinction of being the last places in the Americas to emancipate slaves. The Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and Fourteenth Amendment (1865) accomplished this in the U.S. and the Golden Law in Brazil did the same in 1888, although emancipation occurred gradually there over three decades. Roberto Saba calls the experience "the American Mirror" and argues that it can tell us a great deal about the hemisphere, the industrialization of American economies, and the growth of a new order.Essential Reading:Roberto Saba, American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation (2021).Recommended Reading:Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (2000).Sven Beckert, The Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2015). Matthew Karp,This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016).Angela Alonso,The Last Abolition: The Brazilian Antislavery Movement, 1868-1888 (2021).Greg Downs,The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle Over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (2019).Teresa Cribelli,Industrial Forests and Mechanical Marvels: Modernization in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (2016).