This article assesses the impact that Aileen Kraditor's classic monograph, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement (1965) has had on fifty years of suffrage historiography. Kraditor is best known among scholars for offering the terms “justice” and “expediency” to distinguish between two strains of suffragist argumentation, the former of which she associated with the nineteenth century and the latter with the Progressive Era. Although specialists no longer believe in a firm divide between the two periods, many continue to differentiate between principled (egalitarian) arguments that called for suffrage as a universal right of citizenship and instrumental (expedient) claims that often contained racist assumptions about white women's superiority. The majority of scholars now accept Kraditor's fundamental insight that a political movement devoted to the extension of democracy contained within it antidemocratic and racist elements, but they have challenged other key aspects of Kraditor's work, including her characterization of white southern women's advocacy of suffrage and her Turnerian assumptions about why statewide suffrage referenda succeeded first (and primarily) in the West. In addition, scholars have expanded the terrain of women's political activism to include analyses of black women's suffrage activities and understandings of citizenship; in so doing they have connected the regional histories of the South and the Midwest, displacing Kraditor's national narrative. Collectively the field has moved far beyond Kraditor's focus on the National American Woman Suffrage Association to emphasize the enormous range of suffrage activities that took place before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, demonstrating how woman suffrage encompassed new understandings of citizenship that were inseparable from the histories of Reconstruction, U.S. expansion, and western imperialism.

By most measures, Daniel Augustus Tompkins was a highly unlikely opponent of totalized Chinese exclusion. The owner of three cotton mills and a New South booster editor, Tompkins presided over a racially segregated labor force and had much to say about the necessity of white supremacy for the progress of the South, the nation, and the world. So why, on March 14, 1906, did he testify before the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Foreign Affairs, expressing his opposition to immigration officials' overzealous enforcement of legal barriers against Chinese immigration? Existing approaches to the racial politics of migration to the United States, which have emphasized the interchangeability of anti-black and anti-Chinese racisms in the nineteenth century, make it difficult to account for Tompkins' actions: they would lead us to expect that he would defend both complete Chinese exclusion and black subordination on similar racial grounds. This essay presents a new framework for conceptualizing migration, empire, and the politics of social differentiation that, among other things, will make sense of this seemingly unlikely intervention by a New South industrialist and racial ideologue in U.S. immigration politics. This framework brings together two traditionally separated fields of inquiry: migration history and imperial history. By revisiting Chinese exclusion (and its seemingly odd critics) through an imperial lens, it hopes to demonstrate the value—indeed, the necessity—of connecting these two approaches in the larger effort to entangle U.S. and global histories.

Standard accounts of American Catholic history generally note in passing that American Catholics supported the Spanish-American War but do not examine what reasons provoked them to do so. At the same time, recent literature on the war itself has described various factors that motivated American support, but few of these studies have noted the central role that religion played in Americans' interpretations of the conflict. This article brings these two historiographies together by showing the importance of the war for the Catholic Church in America as well as the significance of religious belief for how many Americans understood the conflict. In particular, providentialist interpretations of the war held by a large number of Catholics reveal a crucial moment in the church's process of Americanization. Yet more importantly, this article focuses on the significant number of Catholics who steadfastly opposed the war, demonstrating the contested nature of the Americanization process. Ultimately, this article maintains that skepticism concerning the righteousness of the American nation motivated antiwar Catholics' resistance to prevalent American attitudes. By integrating American Catholics into our understanding of the Spanish-American War, this article sheds new light on the development of fin de siècle American Catholicism and on the war itself.

Millions of Americans watched the evangelist Billy Sunday preach during the years 1905–1935, and many were profoundly affected by the experience. Using letters, published and unpublished reminiscences, and other primary source documents, this article reconstructs the emotional experience of Sunday's converts and offers insights into the meaning of conversion and followership in Sunday's and other similar social movements. Through their emotional responses to the evangelist, followers recast socioeconomic problems and community pressures as personal, internal crises that could be resolved through adherence to Sunday's principles. The process of conversion was considered and volitional; it was also a long-lasting act of self-fashioning. Americans who converted in Sunday's tabernacles thoroughly reinvented themselves as followers of Sunday and then set out to remake society according to the evangelist's goals. Generalizing from these insights, the article argues that followership of inspirational leaders was a site of significant agency for Progressive Era Americans. It also identifies emotional experience as a way for historical figures to translate cultural trends into concrete social action. The article concludes by calling for additional research into how emotions shape and condition historical change.

What will it take to get Americans to do something about political corruption? I mean the deep corruption of politics and policy now caused by massive campaign contributions, by lobbyists who bundle those contributions for political candidates and then influence the policy decisions of elected officials, by the revolving door between public office and lucrative private employment, and—through all these instruments and more—by the influence of wealthy individuals and interests over the agencies and institutions of government. Some people say this is just American politics as usual: money is inevitable in public life, and anyway it's all perfectly legal. Sadly, those who say this are, at this moment, winning the argument. Writing for the Supreme Court majority in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), Justice Anthony Kennedy opined, “It is well understood that a substantial and legitimate reason, if not the only reason, to cast a vote for, or to make a contribution to, one candidate over another is that the candidate will respond by producing those political outcomes the supporter favors. Democracy is premised on responsiveness.” Cementing the case, says the Court, is the First Amendment, which protects political speech and political dollars.