The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.

While scholars are revitalizing political history, they continue to neglect the formal yet dynamic institutional framework that shaped not merely the traditional subjects of election campaigns and governance but also newer concerns dealing with political participation, representation, power, legitimacy, and conflict. This article focuses on the 1893 senatorial elections in the six states where neither major party held the legislative majority on joint ballot necessary to elect a U.S. senator. This fraught situation derived from the success of the new Populist party and threatened the customary Republican control of both state politics and the U.S. Senate. By examining the previously overlooked actions and interactions of election and canvassing boards, state courts, and party committees with electoral rules, judicial norms, and legislative procedures after the general election of 1892, this article demonstrates that election outcomes were often contingent upon factors other than electoral mobilization, great issues, and popular opinion. Partisanship and the search for power produced “conspiracies” that corrupted basic electoral institutions, subverted voting results, denied rightful representation, violated democratic norms and practices, and provoked popular unrest.

This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.

The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for new Supreme Court abortion rulings or congressional legislation. As scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we are uniquely situated to intervene in this dialogue and ensure that contemporary conversations are grounded in historical context. We present this forum not as an exhaustive account of the Comstock Act and its architect, but as aopportunity to highlight the context in which this law, which holds so much potential relevance for our present, was created, enacted, enforced, and challenged. We hope this forum will stimulate further scholarly and public conversations around the nation’s long history of regulating reproductive rights and how that history became entangled with other social anxieties.

It is best to think of Anthony Comstock’s campaign against vice as a response to Reconstruction that afflicted the nation long after that period was over. Comstock’s rise in the 1870s was not organic; it was backed by wealthy patrons engaged in intense political fighting over issues such as racial equality, taxation, and democracy. And although Comstock began by arresting vendors of so-called obscene goods, he soon expanded his portfolio, pursuing folks of every race and gender engaged in erotic, profane, or blasphemous correspondence. Interfering in personal conversations proved controversial, resulting in attempts by courts and postmasters to restrain Comstock’s authority, but he, nevertheless, prosecuted countless letter writers. The law that bore his name resulted in federal involvement in private correspondence well into the twentieth century.

The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban.1 This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past.2 The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.3 It contained provisions for outlawing abortion and contraception, but the bill’s author, Anthony Comstock, along with his fellow vice crusaders, were mostly concerned about controlling illicit sexuality and censoring sexual material. From the beginning, the law was inconsistently and less often applied to violations involving abortion and contraception than it was against other forms of obscenity.4

Anthony Comstock is synonymous with the Gilded Age crusade against vice. The 1873 “Act of the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” – better known, then and now, as the “Comstock Act” – secured its namesake’s enduring notoriety. Most federal laws with an appellation honor a congressional sponsor, or, in more recent years, a victim of the issue that the law aims to address. Only the Comstock Act memorializes a man who was both the chief civilian proponent of its passage and the government bureaucrat tasked with its enforcement.1

Victoria Woodhull was Mrs. Satan. Or at least that is what Harper’s Weekly wanted its readers to see. The popular New York City-based paper published a full-page engraving, by its most famous artist, of Woodhull as the biblical devil in February 1872 (Figure 2). Horns curl away from her skull and spiked wings stand almost as tall as she does. Anthony Comstock, an evangelical Christian who made it his mission to protect public morals, almost certainly imagined the woman who promoted free love as the personification of evil. He needed public support for his crusade, and this cartoon by Thomas Nast helped him win it. Comstock arrested Woodhull on November 2, 1872, for distributing her supposedly obscene newspaper.

Anthony Comstock arrested many people, but perhaps none was so famous as Madame Restell, whom he arrested on February 11, 1878, for selling contraceptives and abortifacients. While Comstock’s actions had led to the arrest of other celebrated personae in the past – including Victoria Woodhull, her second husband James Blood, and her sister, Tennessee Claflin in 1872 – Restell’s arrest and looming trial led her to commit suicide by slitting her throat on April 1, 1878, which leant even further notoriety to the arrest.1 Because Restell remains best known as an abortion provider, and because Comstock succeeded in passing a federal statute that bears his name, one might assume that abortion occupied a central place in his campaign, or that Restell was arrested for performing an abortion. Neither is completely accurate. Indeed, Restell was not even arrested under the aegis of the federal statute, but instead under New York State law, though certainly at the instigation of Comstock and by him personally. By taking the arrest of Restell as a case study, this essay considers the various legal modes by which Comstock did his work, and the way he understood abortion as related to his greater campaign against obscenity and sexual license.

In addition to reading and assigning the essays in this special forum, instructors may want to bring a discussion of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws into their classes through primary sources. This essay introduces a few readily accessible and rich options.