We have a special treat for you today - we get to listen in on a panel from the conference Old Women, Race, and Power recorded at the Huntington Library in Pasadena CA.. The panel, "Challenging Colonial Imagery: Indigenous Centenarians and Gender in California,” explores the way old age and race intersected in ideas about Indigenous Californians, the California missions, and the Spanish fantasy past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. https://www.huntington.org/event/old-women-race-and-power

The panel includes scholars

• Boyd Cothran (York University)
• Martin Rizzo-Martinez (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Olivia Chilcote (San Diego State University)

The excellent news for listeners is that there will be no ads today per the Huntington’s policies of not monetizing the content. But the Huntington does not endorse the podcast and that the opinions expressed in the episode are those of the speakers and not the Huntington.

The images the panelists discuss are available in the following articles:

Boyd Cothran and Martin Rizzo, "The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas: The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory," in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2018, 168-204 (University of Minnesota Press)

Olivia Chilcote, "Q and A with Bad Indians on 'The Belles of San Luis Rey'” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 47(3) (2024), 47-57

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Why does it feel like government can’t get things done? From housing to infrastructure to climate, even widely supported policies often stall. In this episode, Boyd Cothran speaks with Marc J. Dunkelman about his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back. At the center of Dunkelman’s argument is a tension inside progressivism itself. Since the late nineteenth century, reformers have oscillated between two competing impulses: a Hamiltonian desire to build strong, capable institutions that can solve large-scale problems, and a Jeffersonian instinct to restrain power, disperse authority, and guard against coercion. The Progressive Era did not resolve this tension—it institutionalized it. In this episode, we explore the Progressive Era origins of this tension, the idea of a “Second Gilded Age,” and what it might mean to build a more effective state today.

Further Reading:

Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back

Daniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran, “A Second Gilded Age? The Promises and Perils of an Analogy: Introduction” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19, no. 2 (2020): 191–96.

About the Guest:

Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work focuses on American political development, governance, and the history of reform.

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Today we are delighted to welcome a guest host, Dr. Chelsea Gibson of SUNY Binghampton, and the co-editor of the SHGAPE Blog. who is interviewing three of the 2026 SHGAPE prize winners:

Carlotta Wright de la Cal, winner of the SHGAPE research grant for her project “Rule of Rail: Railroad Labor and Cross-Border Mobility in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1930.”

Nicole Martin winner of the Fischer -Calhoun article prize for “The Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions: The American Home and Reconstruction Politics in the West”, Pacific Historical Review 93, no. 3 (Summer 2024): 445–474.

Manisha Sinha winner of the 2026 Presidents’ Book Prize for The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liveright, 2024)

As many of you may know, our podcast’s sponsoring organization, Society for Historians of the GAPE or (SHGAPE) is an affiliated society of the Organization of American Historians (or OAH. This means that we are quite engaged in the OAH’s annual conference, which is being held this year in Philadelphia on April 16-19, 2026.

SHGAPE sponsors panels at the conference, and also offers workshops, lectures, a luncheon, a reception, and mentoring opportunities for emerging scholars at the annual meeting. The Society also offers a variety of awards, including book and article prizes, a graduate student essay prize, a distinguished historian award, and travel grants to the OAH for graduate students and contingent faculty.

You can find out more information about these prizes and our other opportunities on the SHGAPE.org and more about the Organization of American Historians at oah.org

A big congratulations to the winners and thanks to Dr. Chelsea Gibson for joining us as a guest host!

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