[7] Gross connects these stereotypes to the burgeoning feminist discourse of post-Reconstruction America, and she shows that racial antagonism was prevalent in Philadelphia despite the egalitarian Quaker and liberal democratic founding ideals of the city.
[9] Colored Amazons received the 2005 John Hope Franklin Center Manuscript Prize,[1] and the 2006 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award from the Association of Black Women Historians.
[11] After an unknown victim's torso was discovered and Tabbs and Wilson were identified as murder suspects, the case became a national news story.
[12] Gross uses the murder case to investigate the social history of Philadelphia in the 1880s, producing what the historian Georgina Hickey called "a nuanced exploration of the meaning of race and gender in late nineteenth-century urban America".
[17] Gross and Berry selected stories about historical figures who are not well-known, in what was described in Kirkus Reviews as a "wide-ranging search-and-rescue mission for black female activists, trailblazers, and others who have left a mark".
[19] Gross's work has been cited, or she has been interviewed, in media outlets including The Washington Post,[20] The Philadelphia Inquirer,[21] WNYC,[22] and Time.