Global mass migration was one of the most defining features of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. But so was intense xenophobia. This article offers a new definition of xenophobia and examines how xenophobia helped to drive some of the most defining features of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, including progressive reform, white supremacy, the expanded capacity and power of the nation-state, and the growth of U.S. global power and influence. It draws a connection to contemporary America, where, under the Trump administration, xenophobia is transforming a wide range of public policies, legitimizing racism and white supremacy, and impacting U.S. foreign relations.

U.S. opinion of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) was highly divided. The debate over the war served as a proxy for fights over domestic issues of immigration, inequality, and race. Anglo-American Republicans’ support for the British was undergirded by belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Caucasian but non-Anglo Democrats and Populists disputed the Anglo-Saxonist assumptions and explicitly equated the plight of the Boers to the racial and economic inequalities they faced in the United States. They utilized Anglophobia, republican ideology, and anti-modernist jeremiads to discredit their opponents and to elevate an alternative racial fiction: universal whiteness. Reports written by the celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis while covering the Boer War, along with a wide array of other sources, illustrate the discursive underpinning of the debate. They also suggest the effectiveness of the pro-Boer argument in reshaping the racial opinions of some Anglo-Saxon elites. Although Davis arrived in South Africa a staunch supporter of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism, he came to link the Boers with the republican values and frontier heritage associated with the U.S.’ own history. The equation of the South African Republic's resistance against the British Empire with that of the U.S.’ own war of independence highlighted contradictions between Anglo-Saxonism and American exceptionalism. As a result, Anglo-Saxonism was weakened. Davis and others increasingly embraced a notion of racial identity focused on color. Thus, public reaction to the Boer War contributed to the ongoing rise of a new wave of herrenvolk democratic beliefs centered on a vision of white racial hybridity across the social and political divisions separating Americans of European descent.

This article examines the formative years of flight in the United States and argues that Pan-Americanism served as a guiding ideology in the development of the nation's early aeronautic endeavors. With the advent of the airplane at the turn of the twentieth century, U.S. Pan-Americanists believed that aviation would provide a solution to the sociological and practical problems that hindered the development of international unity among the American republics. By physically transporting individuals, products, and cultural media rapidly across the hemisphere via the sky, aircraft would unite the peoples of Latin America and the United States and promote inter-American cooperation. To see the Pan-American potential of aircraft fulfilled, Pan-Americanists cooperated with private U.S. aviation organizations to expound the value of flight and to generate interest in aviation across the Western Hemisphere. Although a variety of Pan-American initiatives were successfully undertaken during the 1910s, the outbreak of the First World War hindered the movement and ultimately led to the transformation of aviation into a tool of U.S. imperialism in Latin America. By examining the origins of U.S. aviation through the lens of Pan-Americanism, this article seeks to reevaluate the pervading imperial narrative of the history of U.S. aviation in the Western Hemisphere.

Between 1870 and 1914, at least 266 Protestant ministers abandoned their posts, left their homes and families, and eloped with women who were not their wives. As critics of religion used these elopement scandals to discredit American Protestantism, those sympathetic to religion's hold on American morality attempted to dissuade the press from indulging in the sensational. Though initially hesitant to report on Protestant pastors' immoralities in this period, the press eventually came to an almost universal acceptance of scandal as a legitimate journalistic genre. As the public wondered what the proliferation of sex scandals among the Protestant elites might mean for religion in America, the press used the genre of ministerial elopement as an entrée into larger cultural debates about religion, marriage, and romantic love in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

Charles A. Beard's trajectory as a political scientist and expert on municipal government has not yet been fully examined. Based on a close analysis of his teaching at Columbia University and his contributions to city government in New York and Tokyo, this article outlines the development of Beard's vision of American democracy. It argues that, unlike most progressives, Beard refrained from endorsing direct democracy measures as a blueprint for reform, focusing instead on streamlining the American system of government to incorporate, in a transparent fashion, both political parties and interest groups. This article showcases Beard's conception of politics and explains how pluralism and functionalism underpinned his proposals for efficient government.