The extent and intensity of electoral and voter fraud that took place during the U.S. Gilded Age is properly infamous. This paper explores a form of voter intimidation that has garnered comparatively little scholarly attention: economic coercion. Absent secrecy at the polls and security at work, bosses forced workingmen to choose between their job or their vote. Economic voter intimidation provoked both a real and rhetorical crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. In real terms, it disrupted hundreds of elections and damaged thousands of workers’ livelihoods. It became a nationwide crisis after 1873, however, because for the first time, employers were coercing white workingmen on a widespread basis. Reports of employers coercing their employees at the polls throughout the nation confirmed the worst fears of many labor leaders and politicians: white wage-workers were insecure possessors of the franchise whose precariousness might threaten democracy itself. Mining previously overlooked accounts of economic voter intimidation in contested congressional election case records, congressional investigations, corporate records, and newspapers, this article argues that employers’ politicized layoff threats and observation of workers at the polls undermined the political equality of even those men whose whiteness had seemingly secured their privilege.

This study tracks the evolution of racist ideas pertaining to Black drug addiction and crime and the growth of a real interracial drug subculture, both of which had a part in forging New York’s drug policies in the early twentieth century. Well-worn racial tropes about drug use, cultivated in the imaginations of white commentators and pseudoscientists, railroaded African American suspects and contributed to the creation of the early apparatuses of the war on drugs. As observers increasingly connected the specter of cocaine “delirium” to common anxieties about Black crime and miscegenation, they in turn viewed white cocaine use as a solvable shortcoming in need of treatment rather than imprisonment. As such, New York City’s early civic responses to cocaine were shaped as Southern racial discourse collided with the developing panics of the Progressive Era that rallied around the increasing mobility of Black Americans in an effort to manage interracial contact through legislation.

This essay examines the debate within the community of Black intellectuals and politicians about whether or not to abandon the Republican Party in 1916, and discusses both major parties’ attempts to cultivate Black voters. The objective of this article is to analyze 1916 through the lens of the rise of Black political independence and to elucidate the strains of thought that pushed an increasing number of Black thinkers—and, later, everyday Black voters—to operate outside of the political framework of the Republican Party. Though the momentous shift in the Black vote had not yet fully materialized, 1916 saw a pivotal and significant crystallization of discontent with the GOP that pushed Black voters to search for alternatives, including the radical option of a “Negro Party.” Ultimately, this new sense of political opportunity helped create the atmosphere that allowed Black voters to shift to the Democratic Party from 1928 to 1936.

The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020 (just twenty-two city blocks from where I write) sparked global demonstrations and renewed long-standing struggles for change. At the southern border, government agents separated migrant children from their families and confined detainees in cages. Politicization of the pandemic made Asian Americans targets of violent racist outbursts. Indigenous women continued to suffer disproportionate harm with little attention to their plight. Finally, the right-wing insurrection at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, in January 2021 marked the moment as especially volatile.

Throughout the late nineteenth century, Cubans and Filipinos led calls for independence against Spanish colonial rule. In 1898 the United States entered the conflict under the guise of supporting liberty and democracy abroad, declaring war on Spain. The Treaty of Paris of 1898, which ended the war as well as Spanish colonial rule, resulted in the U.S. acquisition of territories off its coasts. This microsyllabus, 1898 and Its Aftermath: America’s Imperial Influence, collects articles that use the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War as a jumping-off point to understand how issues such as labor, citizenship, weather, and sports were impacted by America’s racism and white supremacy across the globe.

Since the historic uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd, growing calls to defund the police have upended mainstream political discourse in the United States. Outrage at appalling evidence of rampant police brutality and an entrenched culture of impunity have moved to the very center of public debate what were until recently dismissed as radical demands. This dramatic shift has, among other things, opened up space for discussion of the history of policing and the prison-industrial complex more broadly. In particular, abolitionists have urged examination of the deep roots of our contemporary situation. As the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba argued in an editorial published in The New York Times, “There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people.”1 That a statement like this would appear in the paper of record reflects a paradigm shift in popular understandings of the history of the criminal legal system.

The absence of Indigenous historical perspectives creates a predicament in the historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For the first eight years of the Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, zero articles written about or by Native Americans can be found within its pages. By 2010, however, a roundtable of leading Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholars critically examined the reasons why “Native Americans often slipped out of national consciousness by the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”1 By 2014, the journal offered a special issue on the importance of Indigenous histories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a “period of tremendous violence perpetuated on Indigenous communities,” wrote the editors Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa.2 It is the observation of Indigenous histories on the periphery of Gilded Age and Progressive Era that inspires a reevaluation of the historiographical contributions that highlight Indigenous survival through the onslaught of settler colonial violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With #saytheirnames, the 2020 Black Lives Matters movement implores the national public to etch the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor into their consciousness. The fight for racial justice is a fight for attention in American popular culture. Activists push for recognition of the right to Black life, celebrities attempt to shine their spotlights on justice initiatives, and public figures debate solutions to systemic racism. The immediacy of today’s racial violence discourse parallels that of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The protests that erupted after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020 took the country by storm. The rapid spread of activist organizing was breathtaking to see. Over the span of a few months, no state in the country was left untouched, and more conversations began to approach acts of racial violence as an institutional problem rather than as a series of isolated incidents. Even six months prior, such widespread activism would have been unimaginable.