It is our distinct pleasure to publish in this issue Albert Broussard’s SHGAPE Distinguished Historian Address, “Still Searching: A Black Family’s Quest for Equality and Recognition during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.” As most readers know, Al Broussard was president of SHGAPE from 2018–2020, and his leadership and guidance were invaluable to the society and this journal during that first, difficult year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic robbed him of the opportunity to give his presidential address. We are fortunate that he returned to give the SHGAPE Distinguished Historian Address at the SHGAPE luncheon at the 2022 OAH in Boston. His presentation, richly illustrated with Stewart family photographs, held the audience in rapt attention.
Popular history often paints the GAPE United States as the land of opportunity for immigrants. Broussard asks us to consider the possibilities emigration offered men and women like the Stewarts as they sought to make the United States a land of opportunity for African Americans. Broussard’s work follows three generations of the Stewart family as they moved across the continental United States and then beyond, to Liberia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the territory of Hawaii. Broussard gives us an intimate portrait of a remarkable Black family who successfully pursued educational, financial, and professional opportunities in an era of relentless racial discrimination. The Stewarts’ determination to persevere and succeed was expansive; it included not just themselves, but all African Americans. To prosper as Americans, though, the Stewarts found that emigration from the United States was a viable strategy, for themselves and for others.
This issue’s research articles continue Broussard’s call to notice the unexpected in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Laura Crossley examines how Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole citizens used the Indian Territory exhibit—housed in a replica of a Southern mansion, complete with Tara-like white columns—at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition to call for the separate statehood of Indian Territory. They failed to achieve their immediate goal, but Crossley argues that their creative use of the “politics of display” laid the foundation for future activism. Daniel Burge reexamines the press’s role in McKinley’s 1898 decision to go to war in Cuba. The sensationalist press had used the story of William Crittenden’s execution by the Spanish in 1851 to push public opinion towards supporting a U.S. invasion of Cuba. But despite the gory details and patriot fervor, Burge finds that ultimately the press had less influence over either foreign policy or public opinion than it wanted.
Today, sensationalist accounts of how historians write and teach U.S. history now routinely fan the fires of furious public and professional debate. This issue’s roundtable, “New Directions in Political History,” enters into these debates. Political history has long been a mainstay of JGAPE and the group of scholars Jeff Broxmeyer has assembled here—Lisa Andersen, Nicolas Barreyre, Rebecca Edwards. Michael Lansing, Allan Lumba, Tara White—tackle what it means to write, read, and teach political history today. In a lively back-and-forth, the roundtable considers the scope of the field, current debates, and what it’s like teaching GAPE political history now. As always, we conclude the issue with a wide-ranging collection of book reviews.
