One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Four days earlier, in his war message to Congress, he gave his rationale for declaring war against Imperial Germany and for creating a new world order. He now viewed German submarine attacks against neutral as well as belligerent shipping as a threat to the whole world, not just the United States. “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” he claimed. “It is a war against all nations.” He now believed that Germany had violated the moral standards that “citizens of civilized states” should uphold. The president explained: “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” He focused on protecting democracy against the German regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. “A steadfast concert for peace,” he said, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.” Wilson called on Congress to vote for war not just because Imperial Germany had sunk three American ships, but for the larger purpose of a new world order. He affirmed: “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.”

Between the 1890s and the 1930s, the “marrying parson”—a minister willing to perform on-demand marriages—became a well-known American cultural figure, caricatured and depicted in daily newspapers and popular magazines. To date, however, no scholar has analyzed this cultural phenomenon. This article explains and analyzes the rise of the marrying parson to cultural prominence in the early twentieth century. It discusses, first, the legal and cultural environment that gave marrying parsons a legal product—a state-sanctioned marriage—that they could sell; and second, the Progressive Era fears over changes in sexual behavior that made marrying parsons both prominent and controversial in popular discourse. Because marrying parsons were marked as religious figures, white Protestant leaders and reformers viewed them as traitors from within, traitors who commercialized the legal privileges of their sacred office as they undermined Protestants' attempts to combat divorce, protect the sexual innocence of young women, and limit youthful sexual autonomy. Although marrying parsons are no longer prominent in popular discourse, religiously ordained individuals continue the quick-marriage activities of early twentieth-century “marrying parsons,” thus revealing the limits of attempts by Protestant leaders to police the commercial use of religious privilege.

On July 12, 1871, the Colorado Springs Company and its largest shareholder, William Jackson Palmer, adopted a plan that divided the hundreds of acres they owned into the streets, blocks, and plots of Colorado Springs. To sell the city, the boosters of Colorado Springs marketed it as a refined resort for wealthy industrialists, health seekers, and tourists. Boosterism in Colorado Springs appealed to these audiences over the next four decades by using a changing mixture of politics, business, and religious morality. This boosterism successfully distinguished the resort of Colorado Springs from the mines, steel mills, and agriculture that defined nearby towns.

In late 1902, exhaustion, financial distress, and the desire for a political appointment—combined with aspirations to serve as a broker for the export of African American labor abroad—led famed African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune to secure a temporary appointment with the Roosevelt administration to investigate trade and labor in Hawaii and the Philippines. In Hawaii, Fortune was fêted by the planter class, and allied himself publicly with the educational and political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. His hopes for black emigration and land ownership, however, were vigorously opposed by most newspapers connected to the oligarchy. Hawaii's robust in-language indigenous and ethnic newspapers, meanwhile, voiced their own position on black labor. In Manila, a fiercely entrepreneurial and militaristic American press attacked Fortune. Recent scholarship ties Washington's Tuskegee Institute to a kind of “Jim Crow colonialism” abroad. An in-depth look at Fortune's journey both supports and troubles such a view. Both men hoped U.S. “expansion,” and African American participation in it, might expose not only the power of race, but also its instability and vulnerability; Fortune, in particular, saw newspapers as vital to this task.

In the history of the American Arts and Crafts Movement, New Orleans's Newcomb College Pottery (founded in 1894) is often singled out as distinctive by virtue of its genesis as an experimental educational venture, all the more remarkable for emerging out of a small women's college located in the Deep South. Scholarship on NCP frequently rehearses the regionalist character of its diverse handicrafts and its adherence to the central tenets of Arts and Crafts. This article explores how Newcomb College Pottery was neither so strictly regionalist nor so pure an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts spirit as is often averred. Situating Newcomb College Pottery within contemporary cultural debates concerning the formation of a “New South,” I demonstrate how the architects and advocates of Newcomb, inspired by the 1884 Cotton Centennial, sought to craft a largely aspirational identity that marketed NCP as a model industry that heralded commercial and cultural development in the region. It was only later, I argue, as the Pottery developed from an educational experiment into a widely known and respected handicraft enterprise, that it embraced the anti-industrial rhetoric that animated the broader Arts and Crafts movement and adopted the more sentimental form of regionalism that traded on romantic evocations of the Old South, in repudiation of the socially and economically progressive energies that gave it birth.

This article examines late nineteenth-century preadmission records taken at the Pennsylvania Training School in order to better understand the biographical and medical characteristics of persons seeking admission to this prominent school for the “feeble-minded.” It draws on those records to then explore how guardians and the superintendent assessed the likelihood and nature of educational improvement. A pioneering institution for the education of people with intellectual disability, the Training School, generally known as “Elwyn,” kept extensive biographical and etiological records that contain a previously untapped wealth of data. These records offer valuable insight into parents’ understanding of their children's disability, their hopes for improvement, and opinions of what would constitute a successful, productive life. The authors use the records to develop a statistical profile of the characteristics of applicants that superintendent Dr. Martin Barr would deem most likely to improve from instruction, and a similar profile for those deemed incapable of improvement. We situate our analysis of the records within the Gilded Age context of anxieties surrounding the state of public education and worker productivity in an industrial economy. In the field of disability studies, the article adds to our understanding of how superintendents constructed and applied the “medical model” of disability and its tension with the lived social experience of disability.