This article focuses on a December 1867 altercation between three blackface minstrel managers – Sam Sharpley, Edwin Kelly, and Francis Leon. The conflict, which escalated from a fistfight to a shooting match, resulted in the death of Sharpley’s brother. The incident was a murder among blackface minstrels, but, more than this, it was a murder about minstrelsy. The blackface minstrel show – a deeply racist but wildly popular form of entertainment – was big business in post-Civil War New York City. Throughout 1867, Sharpley’s troupe was locked in a heated rivalry with Kelly and Leon’s company. When Kelly and Leon signed three of Sharpley’s performers and allegedly began spreading rumors about his financial well-being, Sharpley responded violently. As it examines the December confrontation, the events that preceded it, and the first-degree murder trial that followed, this article situates the incident in the larger history of blackface minstrelsy. It also suggests that popular performance culture must be understood with reference to contemporary shifts in post-Civil War American capitalism.

This article explores the formation of the University of California amidst widespread populist agitation against university leaders in the 1870s. These complaints were rooted in corruption by the Board of Regents as well as their failure to honor the requirement of the 1862 Morrill Act to offer practical training in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” It argues that Yosemite served as a vehicle through which representatives of the University of California countered charges of elitism and fostered a reputation for trustworthy stewardship of public land. These efforts were visible to the public through literary texts, newspapers, public lectures, nature writings, and other forms of popular literature. By positioning Yosemite as a site of middlebrow intellectual exchange and an alternative to the demonstration farms established at other land grant institutions, professors such as Joseph LeConte helped quell populist critiques and strengthen affective ties to the university. The resulting shift in popular sentiment helped secure public trust in the university for the remainder of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

This article explores how capital-labor relations were conceptualized in late nineteenth-century protectionist thought. Taking as an example the American Protective Tariff League (APTL), a national protectionist pressure group that was heavily influenced by industrial interests and attempted to popularize protectionist ideas by issuing newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and posters, it reconstructs the arguments protectionist industrialists used in their agitation targeted at industrial workers. Following the protectionist wage argument, the APTL made the supposed wage benefit to laborers in protected industries the center of their argument. This wage argument was strongly intertwined with nativist and Anglophobic stereotypes. Further, the APTL proposed a unity of interests between capital and labor in tariff matters that hinged on a nationalist interpretation of economic matters, in which the American national economy was conceptualized as being endangered by imports and competition from other national economies but simultaneously as a harmonious cooperation of capital and labor on the inside. Analyzing the organized labor movement’s response to such claims, the article argues that this sort of agitation, while important to industrialists’ arguments, probably had little influence on workers and their stance on the tariff issue.

This article, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1908, concerns immigration inspector Robert L. Dodd who was accused and administratively removed by the federal Immigration Bureau for facilitating the introduction of undocumented Japanese immigrants into the United States. The article examines the government’s case against Dodd and argues that his dismissal was not only a miscarriage of justice but also may have been structured to scapegoat Dodd as part of the ongoing efforts in the Progressive Era toward civil service reforms within federal service.

What is climate history? How can it serve as a lens through which to view other historical questions? This roundtable identifies key themes in Gilded Age and Progressive Era climate history, and demonstrates that this era was pivotal for both scientific and cultural perceptions of climate. It also shows how climate history can illuminate other subjects, including histories of science, medicine, health, and race. Further, it considers present-day implications. This roundtable began as a session sponsored by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the 2024 Organization of American Historians annual meeting in New Orleans. What follows is a conversation based on that panel, a selected bibliography of scholarly sources, and a collection of primary sources for teaching climate history.