LaShonda Barnett Lecture—The Yellow Brick Road to Gilded-Age Research at Chicago’s Newberry Library

During the Gilded Age, ideas of gender and gender relationships shifted drastically in both public and private spheres. The largest wave of immigration from Europe mixed into a population that had been primarily Anglo-and-African American. Add to this heady current, the development of mass consumption, leisure, and the working-class response. Relations between different ethnic groups of women, different classes, and the way power dynamics shaped those interactions complicated women’s social and political struggles. Primary sources such theatre print culture, womens’ diaries, maps, and photographs, illuminate dramatic life stories bursting at the seams of early twentieth-century Chicago, a setting in Barnett’s novel-in-progress, God’s Folly.

Women’s History Graduate Program alumna Dr. LaShonda Katrice Barnett MA ’98, author of the award-winning novel Jam on the Vine (2015), didn’t enter the program to learn to write historical novels, but it turned out to be the best possible training ground to find the stories worth telling. Come hear her discuss the historian’s process as she shares experiences, golden finds, and the joys and challenges of working with the archives of Chicago’s Newberry Library, one of the nation’s oldest independent libraries and a phenomenal repository of Gilded-Age material.

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