Boyd Cothran, York University professor of American history in the Department of History, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies (LA&PS), has been appointed co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (JGAPE). The publication is the premier journal of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and an internationally influential and leading quarterly journal in the field of U.S. history from 1865-1920. Cothran will co-edit the journal alongside Professor C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa of George Mason University.
“We are excited about the strong vision they have for the journal moving forward,” said Professor Amy Wood, executive secretary of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. “We are confident that, in their hands, JGAPE will maintain its reputation as the premier journal for original scholarship on the gilded age and progressive era, as well as a site for incisive historiographical and pedagogical thinking about the field.”
Cothran is a cultural and military historian of the United States after the Civil War, especially reconstruction and the gilded age west, with a focus on historical memory, historiography, and popular representations of North American Indigenous peoples.
His first book Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014) focuses on the historiography of the Modoc War (1872-1873), California’s so-called last “Indian war”. It won the Robert M. Utley Prize of the Western History Association in 2015 for the best book on the military history of the frontier and western North America.
As further testimony to the quality of his research, Cothran won the LA&PS Award for Distinction in Research in 2016 in the Emerging Scholar category.
As a highly regarded scholar of Native American history and the gilded age and progressive era, Cothran is assuming the co-editorship of the JGAPE only five years after receiving his PhD in history from the University of Minnesota in 2012.
“I consider taking the over the helm as editor of a major journal to be the critical next step in my overall research and scholarly agenda,” Cothran said. “Research journals are where cutting-edge research first appears. It’s where new discoveries are weighed and considered and new methodologies are developed and tested. It is an honour and a privilege to have the opportunity to help direct this vital avenue for advancing new historical research and influencing the overall direction of the field.”