The study of the mass circulation “popular magazine” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era was revived during the 1990s as part of the emerging fields of gender studies, consumer studies, and the study of the new middle class. Richard Ohmann's seminal work viewed these magazines through the lens of the political economy and class relations of an emerging corporate capitalist society and explored the relationship between mass culture and the political economy of capitalism. This paper reexamines the connection between a national mass culture, the new middle class, and an emerging corporate capitalist society through the lens of post-structuralist discourse theory. Corporate capitalism is conceptualized as in part a discourse, the new liberalism, which incorporated or rearticulated populist and socialist discourses and in doing so temporarily won the consent of the capitalist class, middle classes, and segments of the working class. Through the pages of popular magazines readers were offered pieces of a new discourse that embraced corporations rather than the “free market,” women's entry into public life, and new constructions of the self. During the muckraking era, elements of socialism and populism were integrated into mainstream American culture. Overall, the essay argues that a discourse perspective on popular magazines can open up new perspectives on corporate capitalism and the new liberalism. While corporate capitalism marked the decline of the producer–republican tradition, it also marked the emergence of an American social democratic tradition, a mixture of capitalist and socialist social formations.

Often overlooked, Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was an experimental novelist who produced a sustained and critical engagement with the economic, political, and aesthetic effects of unregulated capitalist expansion in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on The Web of Life (1900) and Together (1908), this essay argues that Herrick's novels forcefully document a radical middle-class political position and demonstrate how the middle class was capable of apprehending and resisting the functionings of capitalism—especially its fragmentation of lived experience and its foreclosure of any practical exterior to the social totality. Given how recent economic trends toward deregulation and privatization have resulted in a precarious situation for the middle class worldwide, Herrick's depiction of the emergence of the modern middle class in 1890s Chicago also presents a dynamic foil from which to view our present moment. Though his genre-bending and politically ambiguous literary and political experiments have long contributed to critical confusion and even dismissal of his work, today Herrick's novels are a powerful tool for rethinking the long-accepted understanding of the relationship between literary realism, the struggles surrounding the emergence of corporate capitalism, and the political standpoint of the professional middle class.

This article examines an early twentieth-century town-gown conflict to illuminate the class and religious tensions that complicated student voluntarism at Harvard University, where the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) formed in 1900 to unify the university's religious and service organizations. With PBHA, Harvard joined universities across the country in promoting student service and joining Progressive Era reform initiatives. The controversy following a student's talk at a Protestant Boston church—where the speaker criticized predominantly Catholic East Cambridge—shows why university representatives had trouble achieving their goals. In the decade following, PBHA struggled to articulate its mission, torn between its commitment to the Protestant Christian Association and a more secular approach, while striving to train effective volunteers and establish smooth relationships with professional social service organizations. This story of PBHA's early years exemplifies the challenges universities faced as they sought to put idealism into practice and transform students into social servants.

This essay addresses the question of how the idea of liberalism and antireligious sentiment became associated during the Gilded Age. The subject of this essay—the New York Liberal Club, a debate and lecture group in New York City (1869–1877)—sheds light on the process in which liberalism, as an idea, outgrew its religious origins in early nineteenth-century America and more than ever became linked with antireligious sentiment. In the case of the New York Liberal Club, this development owed to the club's connection to social science and members' participation in the contentious debate over science and religion during the 1870s. In addition, it partly owed to club members' conception of liberalism as tolerance, open-mindedness, and a commitment to the free exchange of ideas. Because of this conception of liberalism, many club members saw liberalism and social science as a common cause, since both reflected a dedication to improving the world through free inquiry. Ultimately, these conceptions, as well as discourse at the club, led many observers in the public to incorrectly view all Liberal Club members (and liberalism itself) as in opposition to faith and religious belief.

While the Progressive Era in U.S. history featured varied examples of individuals and organizations turning to the federal government for reform and support, major narratives have mainly left American Indian tribal communities out of the story. This essay argues that Native people actually were quite active in their reservation communities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among other things, they held their own political councils, sent petitions to federal officials to promote their own agendas, and supported delegations to make their case in Washington, DC. This case study of activism on the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota reveals numerous similarities and distinctions between Indian and non-Indian people in terms of progressive activism, while reinforcing the idea of American Indian political adaptations and cultural persistence during the Progressive Era.