Historians have correctly interpreted the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as periods in which African Americans faced unpreceded violence, a significant decline in franchise, and the loss of many civil rights. These years however, were far more complex when viewed from the vantage point of African American families who attempted to empower themselves through education, securing employment in white-collar occupations, such as teaching, and working to advance themselves through race betterment groups, including women’s clubs and civil rights organizations. Yet some middle-class Black families like the Stewarts not only rejected white society’s widely held belief of Blacks as racially inferior and incapable of progress. They also embraced migration as a constructive strategy to advance their individual careers and to elevate the race. In an era when the majority of Black workers had minimal literacy and worked unskilled menial jobs, T. McCants Stewart and his children each graduated from college or professional school, worked in white-collar or professional jobs, and paved the way for the next generation. Yet each also understood that migration outside of the Jim Crow South, including to Africa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the territory of Hawaii, held the key to their success. Thus, the Stewarts constructed a new vision of freedom and opportunity and believed that even despite the repressive conditions imposed upon Blacks during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that there was room for growth and an opportunity to advance their careers. Migration, therefore, should be reconsidered as a viable strategy that some Black families adopted to find their place in American society.

Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, Muscogee, and Seminole citizens employed the Indian Territory exhibits at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition to advance the separate statehood movement. Increasingly shut out of the formal political realm, they adopted creative measures to exert their political will, including participating in the world’s fair. Employing insights from settler-colonial theory and public history, this paper argues that the politics of display expanded the agency of a group marginalized from political representation. The U.S. government, pressured by the territory’s growing population of non-Native settlers, had begun planning for statehood, passing the 1898 Curtis Act to force allotment and dissolve the Five Tribes’ governments by 1906. To protect their land and sovereignty, a cohort of Native citizens pursued statehood for Indian Territory separate from Oklahoma Territory. Although joint statehood won out, separate statehood advocates succeeded in creating exhibits that centered on the survival of Native nations. They also articulated an Indigenous conception of citizenship, developing an imaginative vision for a future in which self-determination and U.S. citizenship could converge in a Native state. This represented a novel contribution to ongoing debates over how to integrate remaining western territories into the United States and how to incorporate diverse peoples within the citizenry.

As historians have begun to conceptualize the U.S. Civil War as a global event, so too must they consider Reconstruction as a political process that transcended national boundaries. The United States and Colombia both abolished slavery during civil wars; ex-slaves in both societies struggled for full citizenship and landholding, partially succeeding for a time; in both societies, a harsh reaction ripped full citizenship from the freedpeople and denied their claims to the land. These events, usually studied only as part of a national story in either the United States or Colombia, can also be understood, and perhaps be better understood, as a history of hemispheric and transnational processes—of race, of republican politics, of contests over equality, of capitalism. This essay examines the words and actions of historical actors, especially U.S. African Americans and afrocolombianos, to note the impressive commonalities of discourse (which was almost exactly the same in many cases) and political repertoires. This article focuses first on the agency of African Americans in both societies to create post-emancipation social movements for citizenship and land and then on the, largely successful, reactions against these movements.

This roundtable takes up old themes and new perspectives in the field of political history. Scholars engage with six questions across three main categories: the scope of the field, current debates, and teaching. The first two questions ask how we should think about political power and the boundaries of what constitute political history. The section on current debates interrogates the relationship between governing and social movements during the GAPE, and how to situate the political violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot in historical perspective. The final section on teaching takes up two very different challenges. One question is a perennial concern about connecting with students in the classroom about political history. The other dilemma is how to respond to the growing cascade of censorship laws passed by state legislatures that prohibit the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.”