This essay, a slightly revised version of the distinguished historian address presented to SHGAPE in April 2013, suggests that millennial learners are oftentimes inadequately introduced to the African American experience during the Progressive Era, a period that historians of the black past, sampling from Rayford W. Logan's 1954 opus, customarily call “the Nadir” or “the lowest point” in the African American struggle for social justice. When discussing the Progressive Era, normative U.S. history textbooks at high school and college and university levels tend to relegate blacks to the margins of cultural and historical change, minimize lynching and other forms of anti-black violence that characterized the period, and endorse the archaic W. E. B. Du Bois–Booker T. Washington dichotomy of black leadership at the expense of oversimplifying and even denigrating Washington's accomplishments and legacy. On the other hand, specialized African American history textbooks and monographs equip their readers with critical interpretations that challenge what historian Manning Marable called the “master narrative of American history.” In this essay, I offer my thoughts on these subjects and propose some basic suggestions for more effectively teaching, problematizing, and thinking about the African American experience during the complex Progressive Era.

Violence inevitably plays a part in discussions of the cowboy, historical or mythical. Traditionalists celebrated his manly fighting as what tamed the West and saved American manhood; revisionists have castigated the brutality with which he dealt with Native Americans and the environment. It is important, however, to consider what purpose violence served for the cowboy himself. To the working-class cowboy, violence could preserve social harmony, both through defending personal honor and through regulating social behavior of women and minorities. Its use was a clear marker of masculinity, as it allowed him both to show his equal worth with the men around him and to maintain social hierarchies that gave him an advantage over other people. The middle- and upper-class townspeople and cattlemen around cowboys, however, increasingly saw violence as counterproductive. Although parents encouraged aggression in boyhood, they thought that in order to become a real man, one should learn proper restraint and channel that aggression into socially acceptable activities. More and more, respectable ideas of maintaining social order left no room for violence, and consequently cowboys faced increasing social regulation of their masculine self-identities.