In this essay, Dalton generously responds to this journal's request that she detail aspects of her journey to Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life with an eye to the contemporary challenges posed by biography. As I learned from my own experience writing about Robert and Belle La Follette, biography is a deceptively complicated genre. It becomes positively volatile when the subject is as quintessential to a period as Roosevelt is to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. In relating her personal and political story, Dalton skillfully reveals the special challenges of recasting a strenuous life that has been told many times and about which many biographers and historians feel downright proprietary. She also provides valuable insight into the rewards of augmenting more traditional research methods with the many tools of understanding (especially gender studies) available to today's historian. Dalton provides a thoughtful assessment of the many factors at work in the larger community of scholars. Moreover, her incisiveness and delightful writing style help to explain the phenomenal success of her complex and compelling portrait of Theodore Roosevelt.
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) with support from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center. The Journal publishes original essays and reviews scholarly books on all aspects of U.S. history for the time period of 1865 through the 1920s. The Journal encourages submissions in every field of inquiry, including politics and government, social and cultural history, business, economic, and labor history, international relations, comparative and transnational history, issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, legal, intellectual, and religious history, science and medicine, technology, the arts, and material culture, rural and urban history, and regional history. Public historians and independent scholars as well as academic historians are invited to submit, as are social scientists working on historical issues and scholars in American Studies.
Founded in 1987, the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era exists to foster and advance the study and understanding of the history of the United States during the period 1865 to 1917. Membership is open to anyone interested in this topic, with reduced rates for student members. In addition to publishing the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the Society sponsors scholarly sessions and events at annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, provides conference travel support, hosts a website that includes original field-related content, co-sponsors the listserv H-SHGAPE, and awards prizes for books, articles, and unpublished graduate student research in the field. Its luncheon during the Organization of American Historians meeting features a distinguished historian address and a presidential address in alternating years. A 501(c)(3) corporation, the Society may be reached through contacting the President or Executive Secretary as listed on the SHGAPE website.
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