A Message from JGAPE's Co-Editors

Dear H-SHGAPE Subscribers

Please see a message from JGAPE's co-editors, Boyd Cothran and Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, about JGAPE's new Book Review Editor. 

We are delighted to announce that Joseph Locke, assistant professor of history at the University of Houston-Victoria, will serve as the next Book Review Editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. A historian of the U.S. South and the U.S-Mexico borderlands during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 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 (Oxford University Press, 2017), which reconstructs the religious crusade to achieve prohibition in Texas to reveal how southern religious leaders overcame long-standing 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 massively collaborative online American history textbook project begun in 2014. As book review editor, Locke will continue to expand and deepen our coverage of the latest scholarship on the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as well as explore new avenues of review and commentary on public history projects, museum exhibits, and new media. We are excited to welcome him aboard and we look forward to working with him in the years to come.

In welcoming Joseph Locke to the team, we 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 8 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 a keen editorial eye. Maintaining an active roster of reviewers and keeping a watchful eye on deadlines, while issuing reminders and gentle prodding is not a glorious task, but 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 us, and our predecessors, define our vision and develop a distinctive voice. We will miss Elaine’s brilliance, 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. 

Sincerely,
Boyd Cothran & C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa
Co-Editors of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era