This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.

This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

During the American woman suffrage movement, opponents described suffragists as abnormal, unsexed, non-mothers who desired to leave the home and family en masse, levying “war against the very foundation of society.” This charge ultimately compelled suffragists around the nation to respond by embracing expediency arguments, insisting the women's votes would bring morality, cleanliness, and order to the public sphere. This article charts how suffragists capitalized on movements for home economics, municipal housekeeping, and pure food to argue for the compatibility of politics and womanhood. In particular, this article examines suffrage cookbooks, recipes, and bazaars as key campaign tactics. More than a colorful historiographical side note, this cookery rhetoric was a purposeful political tactic meant to combat perennial images of suffragists as “unwomanly women.” And suffragists ultimately employed the practice and language of cookery to build a feminine persona that softened the image of their political participation and made women's suffrage more palatable to politicians, male voters, potential activists, and the general public.

From 1862 to 1923, congressional seed distribution was among the most important functions of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). One of the largest agricultural programs in the late nineteenth century, the practice itself stayed in place until 1923. The subject of little historical research, the seed distribution project is usually viewed as a failure of the scientific agricultural establishment, or as vote mongering by Congress, and its demise as the simple culmination of Progressive Era reform. However, this episode in American history reveals much more than debates over science and agriculture by highlighting the many cultural, economic, scientific, and political questions about the proper role of government in a democracy. By examining heated contemporary political exchanges and published critiques, this article assesses what different constituencies viewed as good in government as they argued for or against free seed distribution, even as the USDA used seed as a vehicle for consolidating the place of science and knowledge in agriculture and in government.

This article examines contests over improving the municipal waterfront in New York during the Gilded Age, and it uncovers the hidden history of Thirteenth Avenue. To maintain its commercial prominence and competitive edge, New York established the Department of Docks in 1870, granting it the authority to manage maritime trade and oversee the redesign and modernization of the city's wharves and piers. Debates about how a modern industrial and commercial waterfront should look centered on new ideas about the aesthetic economy of cities. Business and civic leaders believed that the beauty of the built environment could be leveraged as an asset to attract commerce and industrial investment. But these debates about improving the industrial waterfront ultimately pitted business interests against maritime labor and local manufacturers. Thirteenth Avenue was a small-scale industrial district on the far edge of Greenwich Village that stood in the way of the lucrative transatlantic steamship trade. Siding with mercantile interests over those of small manufacturers, the city condemned Thirteenth Avenue in the 1890s and reclaimed it for the Hudson River to make way for the Chelsea Piers. These elaborate Beaux-Arts piers served as an aesthetic frame for New York City, but they also reflected the unequal dynamics of municipal planning and politics at the turn of the twentieth century.

This article situates Mark Twain's anti-imperialism within the wider atheist and freethought response to debates about the American turn to empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While historians have been alert to the ways in which religion influenced debates around empire at this time, there have yet to be any studies of the views of American atheists and freethinkers on this question. I examine Twain and Robert Ingersoll, the leading American freethinker of the era, as well as some of the major freethought periodicals in the United States, the Truth Seeker, the Blue-Grass Blade, and the Free Thought Magazine, and argue that their irreligious views informed their responses to imperialism, from the initial support for a war against Catholic Spain, to opposition to the war against the Philippines motivated in large part by a hostility toward organized religion and its role in American expansion. More broadly, I argue for the need to move beyond a simplistic understanding of anti-imperialism within an American religious landscape that was basically Protestant, to a more nuanced understanding that incorporates the diversity of religious and nonreligious perspectives.

This essay examines Theda Skocpol's landmark 1992 book, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, and discusses its influence historians of the U.S. welfare state. The first section summarizes the book's “state-centered” approach and its central arguments and discusses its reception. It pays particular attention to critiques from women's and gender historians, who challenged Skocpol's characterization of Progressive Era “maternalist reform” particularly for its failure to account for racial politics or the limitations of rooting women's claims to social citizenship in mothering. The second section explores Skocpol's influence on historians of the U.S. welfare state in the past twenty-five years. Scholars of women and gender followed Skocpol's call to “bring the state back in,” bringing the insights of two decades of social and cultural history to the arena of state-building. In the process, they illuminated the centrality of race and racial politics to American social policy and citizenship in ways that Skocpol largely elided. Skocpol's discovery of the peculiar forms of American social provision also profoundly influenced welfare state scholars, who uncovered the vast reach of the “hidden” or “submerged state” in shaping unequal citizenship and political identities around race, gender, sexuality, and other axes of difference. Finally, the essay discusses historians’ attention to an aspect largely absent from Protecting Soldiers and Mothers—the voices, perspectives, and actions of participants in welfare state programs and policies—which has deepened and expanded understanding of the processes and effects of welfare state-building in the past twenty-five years.