Since the Progressive Era itself, scholars have exhibited strong interest in the connections between progressivism and education. Historical studies have elucidated countless ways that such reformist impulses as the settlement house movement, the country life movement, the progressive education movement, the “cult of efficiency,” and battles against social ills like child labor influenced early twentieth-century education policy.1 Indeed, as historian Lawrence Cremin has contended, “the Progressive mind was ultimately an educator's mind, and … its characteristic contribution was that of a socially responsible reformist pedagogue.”2

“The Tenor of Belonging” examines the origins of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a chorus of college students from Fisk University, amidst the official promises of the Reconstruction era, as well as their reception during their first national tour in 1871 and 1872. The article explores the bifurcated meanings behind the spiritual as the singers performed it in this new context. Publicly, it became, for well-to-do white Northern audiences, an image of a quintessential American identity rooted in the soil, “primitive Christianity,” and the trope of redemption through suffering that seemed increasingly threatened in modern, incorporated America. And yet, spirituals had embodied ideals of self-making, piety, communal solidarity, and liberation for their singers since the late eighteenth century; and performing them, as the Jubilee Singers did, likewise became a vehicle for achieving financial security after the Civil War, as the chorus marketed its past in an effort to secure its future. The singers, like their slave forebears, used the spiritual to achieve a level of autonomy, cohesion, and pride as they negotiated the contours of citizenship in a reconfigured nation. As such, their work both prefigures Booker T. Washington's “bootstraps” ethos and W.E.B. Du Bois's “double-consciousness.”

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.

During the decades around 1900, changing intellectual currents and the creation of the research university led American colleges and universities to alter the role of religion in students' education. Simultaneously, women matriculated in large numbers for the first time, forcing individual institutions to ask whether and how to incorporate them. Using the lens of all-male Princeton University, this article explores how these two trends combined to help instill gender ideals in the Progressive Era male elite. Princeton sought to attract an elite constituency by no longer seeking to inculcate in students simply moral excellence in general, but rather traits associated with prominent men specifically. Princeton's leaders reinforced this gendered moral formation as they shifted from evangelical spirituality focused on relating rightly to God to modernist spirituality focused on relating rightly to the human community. That students embraced these changes suggests that a new approach to moral formation at prominent men's colleges—and coeducational universities that copied their approach—may help explain why, in an era when women could first access an education equal to men's, educated men nevertheless continued to see themselves as uniquely suited for certain public leadership roles by virtue of their sex.