After the Civil War, northern Methodists undertook a successful mission to recruit a biracial membership in the South. Their Freedmen's Aid Society played a key role in outreach to African Americans, but when the denomination decided to use Society funds in aid of schools for Southern whites, a national controversy erupted over the refusal of Chattanooga University to admit African Americans. Caught between a principled commitment to racial brotherhood and the pressures of expediency to accommodate a growing white supremacist commitment to segregation, Methodists engaged in an agonized and heated debate over whether schools intended for whites should be allowed to exclude blacks. Divisions within the leadership of the Methodist Episcopal Church caught the attention of the national press and revealed the limits of even the most well-intentioned efforts to advance racial equality in the years after Reconstruction.

In 1892, H. Seb Doyle, an African American preacher, learned that Democrats sought to lynch him due to his support of Populist Congressman Tom Watson. Was the threat real? This question became the center of a campaign discussion of race, politics, and corruption. Democratic and Populist newspapers’ accounts of this issue reveal the role of the “rhetoric of corruption” in the Georgia Populist Party's campaigns in the 1890s. Ironically, Populists used the same rhetoric Democrats had used against Republicans during Reconstruction. Populists linked Democratic political and economic malfeasance with the racial “corruptions” of miscegenation and “Negro Domination.” Although the Populists attempted to make this link, their insistence on black and white political equality undermined their white supremacist rhetoric, thereby weakening their case. Despite the Populists’ failure, the ultimate result was the same: the Populists came to abandon biracial politics and called for greater disfranchisement, all in the name of reform.

This article investigates ideas of race in Gilded Age socialism by analyzing the intellectual production of the leaders of the Socialist Party of America (SLP) from 1876 to 1882. Existing scholarship on socialism and race during the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era rarely addresses socialist conceptions of race prior to 1901 and fails to recognize the centrality of scientific racialism and Darwinism in influencing socialist thought. By positioning American socialism within a transatlantic scenario and reconstructing how the immigrant origins of Gilded Age socialists influenced their perceptions of race, this article argues that scientific racialism and Darwinism competed with color-blind internationalism in shaping the racial policies of the SLP during the Gilded Age. Moreover, a transatlantic investigation of American socialist ideas of race presents a reinterpretation of the early phases of the history of the SLP and addresses its historical legacies. While advocates of scientific racialism and Darwinism determined the racial policies of the SLP in the 1880s, color-blind internationalists abandoned the party and extended their influence beyond organized socialism, especially in the Knights of Labor.

This essay considers two land disputes that took place in the first decade of U.S. rule in the Philippines and that reached the U.S. Supreme Court: Cariño v. Insular Government (1909) and Reavis v. Fianza (1909). In arguing their cases, litigants were forced to reckon with the property rights regime of the former Spanish empire. In this regard, the cases affirm the import of inter-imperial frameworks for understanding colonial problems of land ownership and sovereignty. When arguing over the rightful owners of Philippine lands, parties to these cases also drew on the history and legal bases of land dispossession and settler colonialism in the American West. Further, in later decades, the arguments made in one of these cases would figure into legal conflicts over Native American lands. These cases thus suggest the value of also examining intra-imperial relationships, the emphasis of this essay. They demonstrate how histories and legal structures of settler-driven “expansion” and extra-continental colonialism informed, even constituted, each other.