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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In this episode, Boyd Cothran and Cathleen Cahill sit down with James H. McCommons to discuss his sweeping new book, The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds — publishing March 17, 2026.

📘 Pre-order now:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250286895/thefeatherwars/

At a moment when conservation feels both urgent and politically contested, McCommons takes us back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Americans nearly drove some of their most iconic bird species to extinction — not primarily for food, but for fashion. Millions of birds were killed to supply the booming plume trade. Entire rookeries were destroyed so feathers could adorn women’s hats.

But The Feather Wars is about far more than birds. It is a story about how societies change.

McCommons shows that reform required not only outrage, but organization; not only persuasion, but law. The eventual passage of federal wildlife protections reshaped American culture and preserved species that might otherwise have vanished.

As we confront our own era of environmental crisis, this story raises enduring questions: How does a society move from normalization to moral reckoning? When does law follow culture — and when must it lead? What does it take to create durable change?

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There’s a lot in the news these days about politics on college campuses with discussions of student protests, curriculum debates, and faculty engagement serving as hot button issues. This sudden and intense focus makes it seem as if this may be a new phenomenon, though anyone who lived through the 1960s and 70s would beg to differ.

Our guest today, Dr. Kelly L. Marino’s recent book, Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign, (NYU Press, 2024) https://nyupress.org/9781479825196/votes-for-college-women/ pushes that chronology back even further by exploring the role that female college students and alumni played in the suffrage movement as well as in shaping college activism moving into the future.

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