The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has some exciting personnel changes to announce. At the end of 2019, C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa resigned as co-editor in order to pursue new opportunities. While we are sad to see him go, I am delighted to announce that he will be replaced by Rosanne Currarino, who will serve out the remainder of his term as co-editor (until July 2022). Professor Currarino, who received her PhD from Rutgers University in 1999, is a historian of the intellectual and cultural history of economic life in nineteenth-century America. She has served on the JGAPE editorial board since 2017 and has long been an active member of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In 2002, she was appointed Assistant Professor of History at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where she is now an Associate Professor. Her book, The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (2010), examines diverse efforts to redefine the parameters of democratic participation in industrial America. She has also written articles on the American Federation of Labor, historical economics and the origins of labor history, and cultural economy. She has published several articles and essays in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, including one in the April 2020 issue (19.2). Her current book project, Orange Grove Capitalism: Imagining the Modern Economy, 1870–1910, uses Southern California's fledgling orange industry—from early settlers through the formation of the marketing cooperative Sunkist—as a lens through which to reconsider how we tell the history of the “age of incorporation.” Professor Currarino's research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Huntington Library. I am also told she can make a passable fruit galette.
I am also delighted to welcome Joseph Locke, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Houston-Victoria, as the new JGAPE book review editor. A historian of the U.S. South and the U.S-Mexico borderlands during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Professor Locke is an innovative scholar of impressive breadth and range. He is the author of Making the Bible Belt: Texas Prohibitionists and the Politicization of Southern Religion (2017), which reconstructs the religious crusade for alcohol prohibition in Texas. He shows how southern religious leaders overcame longstanding anticlerical traditions and built a powerful political movement that injected religion irreversibly into public life. He is also the co-creator and co-editor of The American Yawp, (www.americanyawp.com), a collaborative online American history textbook project begun in 2014. As book review editor, Professor Locke will continue to expand and deepen our coverage of the latest scholarship on the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and explore new avenues of review and commentary on public history projects, museum exhibits, and new media. I'm excited to welcome him aboard.
In welcoming Joseph Locke to the team, I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of our outgoing book review editor, Elaine Frantz Parsons. During her eight years of service, Elaine curated and edited hundreds of book reviews, and in doing so shaped the field of GAPE history. As she sought out important books in the field and matched them with reviewers, she did so with grace and poise and then followed up with keen editorial skill. Maintaining an active roster of reviewers and keeping a watchful eye on deadlines while issuing reminders and gentle prodding is not a glorious task; Elaine carried it out with good will and a sharp sense of humor. Beyond producing the book review section, Elaine also helped shape the entire journal. As the unofficial “third” editor of the journal, she helped the journal define its vision and develop a distinctive voice. We will all miss Elaine's brilliance, her scholarly wisdom, and her shared sense of the importance of a politicized—but not polemical—history along with great respect for the classic virtues of historical spadework.
