Sarah Gold McBride is a historian and lecturer in the Program in American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Gold McBride 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 books and newspapers they read, the art and science they created, the plays and freak shows they attended, the museums and world’s fairs they visited, and the information they found meaningful as they tried to understand race, gender, and national identity. Dr. Gold McBride's first book is Whiskerology: The Culture of Hair in Nineteenth-Century America (Harvard, 2025). She lives with her husband and two children in the San Francisco Bay Area's East Bay.