Participant Info

First Name
Sarah
Last Name
Gold McBride
Country
United States
State
Affiliation
Program in American Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Website URL
https://as.ugis.berkeley.edu/people/sarah-gold-mcbride/
Keywords
19th century, United States, cultural history, social history, race, gender, hair, facial hair, beards, bodies, freak shows, wigs, fake hair, popular entertainment, popular culture, history of science
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

Sarah Gold McBride is Lecturer in the Program in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Gold McBride is a historian who specializes in the social and cultural history of the nineteenth-century United States. Her research and teaching focus on the lives of ordinary Americans: the communities they lived in, the books and newspapers they read, the plays and museums and freak shows they attended, the art and science they created, and the information they found meaningful as they tried to understand race, gender, and national identity.

Dr. Gold McBride’s first book, Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America, will be published by Harvard University Press in June 2025.

Recent Publications

Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America. Harvard University Press, June 2025. 

Review of Undoing Slavery: Bodies, Race, and Rights in the Age of Abolition, by Kathleen M. Brown, Journal of the Civil War Era 14, no. 2 (June 2024). 

Review of Spirituals and the Birth of a Black Entertainment Industry, by Sandra Jean Graham, Journal of Southern History 85, no. 1 (February 2019).

Media Coverage
https://news.berkeley.edu/2015/11/10/whiskers-and-locks-reading-u-s-history-through-hair/
Country Focus
United States
Expertise by Geography
United States
Expertise by Chronology
19th century
Expertise by Topic
Gender, Material Culture, Pedagogy, Race, Science, Women