American Indian people fit poorly into the sweeping stories most commonly told about American history. Puritan-inspired stories of national origins and Turnerian frontier narratives cast Indians as outsiders whose role was to be dispossessed and then disappear. More recent counter-narratives of conquest and of redemptive struggles for citizenship allow Native actors important and autonomous roles, but are also premised on a teleology of assimilation and civil rights that flattens the complexity of Indian uses of U.S. citizenship rights. The history of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, shows how the paradox of Indian citizenship is central to stories about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.

What follows is a written reproduction of a forum held at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in San Francisco in April 2013. The forum commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Eric Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Kate Masur (Northwestern University) organized and introduced the discussion, and the commentators in order of speaking were the following:

• • Heather Andrea Williams, The University of Pennsylvania

• • Gregory P. Downs, City College of New York and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York

• • Thavolia Glymph, Duke University

• • Steven Hahn, The University of Pennsylvania

• • Eric Foner, Columbia University

Alexander Graham Bell stood at the intersection of two late nineteenth-century American social developments. First, a nascent deaf community, threaded by residential schools and the use of a shared visual language, began to form by the 1850s, drawing deaf people into regular interaction and intermarriage. Second, the American eugenics movement, determined to eliminate perceived social problems through reproductive restrictions, came to prominence as the century neared its end. Bell's role in publicly connecting these two historical threads has earned him the approbation of the American deaf community and historians of disability.

This article examines Bell's words and actions closely over thirty years to argue that a combination of Bell's own hubris and historians' tendency to conflate two aspects of his complex attitude toward disability has distorted historical memory. Bell feared that difference alone led to inequality, and he hoped that society could be improved through informed reproductive decisions. Ultimately, Bell found himself entangled in an alarming eugenic environment and sought to thwart eugenicists who would interfere with deaf reproductive rights.

In the 1890s, questions about whether to base the American currency upon gold or silver dominated public discourse and eventually forced a realignment of the political parties. The matter often confuses modern observers, who have trouble understanding how such a technically complex—even arcane—issue could arouse such passions. The fact that no major nation currently backs its currency with precious metal creates the suspicion that the issue was a “red herring” that distracted from matters of far greater importance. Yet the rhetoric surrounding the “Battle of the Standards” indicates that the more sophisticated advocates of both sides understood that, in the financial context of the 1890s, the contest between gold and silver not only had important economic implications but would substantially affect the future development of the United States.

Sonya Levien (1888–1960) achieved a modicum of fame and fortune by writing stories and screenplays for Hollywood studios beginning in 1922 and ending only with her death. Her remarkable story began as the daughter of the immigrant working class and represents a narrative that took her from Greenwich Village to Hollywood. This essay explores her coming of age during the 1910s and, consequently, the process through which America invited those at the fringes to join in defining its national and civic creed. Herein lays the significance of Sonya Levien to an understanding of progressivism. By bridging the divides that separated Americans into groups defined by gender, class, ethnicity, and even politics, Levien engaged a number of the major issues of her day.