In the 1890s, Hardy L. Brian was among Louisiana's leading Populists. He was a key founder of the Louisiana People's Party and served as state party secretary and editor of the organization's weekly newspaper. Son of a prominent agrarian dissident from the Louisiana piney woods, Brian believed deeply in the power of an aroused populace to bring fundamental changes to American political and economic life. Over time, however, he abandoned social movement organizing in favor of conventional party politics. The climax of this journey came in 1896, when Brian joined fellow delegates to the Populist national convention to give the People's Party presidential nomination to Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan nomination cost the Populists their independent political identity and precipitated a collapse of their party organization. Hardy L. Brian's journey from agrarian rebel to conventional reform politician reflects a loss of faith in the power of the Populist vision. While he never abandoned the goal of fundamental change, Brian lost faith in the power of this goal to inspire and arouse. Instead, he embraced the logic of conventional party politics, and upon that logic the Populist vision foundered.

The rambunctious world of Gilded Age politics, with its boisterous partisan rallies and three-hour long declamations on the finer points of tariff schedules and monetary policy, passed from the scene of American politics rather abruptly about a century ago. Despite its superficial similarities with politics today — sex scandals, corporate influence, and partisan gridlock in Washington — the spirit and substance of Gilded Age politics was quite different from political discourse today. Politics was a national obsession to nineteenth century Americans. Partisanship was open and vigorous because common people believed the issues were important and political parties represented divergent viewpoints. Men (and in a few places women) of every ethnic and racial background, and from every walk of life, overwhelmingly participated in America's democratic experiment. This made Gilded Age politicians some of the greatest heroes and villains of the era.

One striking parallel between the Gilded Age and today is the return of the “ring” as a volatile form of governance. Rings are small bands of entrepreneurs who, through capture of key political institutions, exploit the coalition-building imperatives of party politics to rapidly accumulate large personal fortunes. The vernacular hails from the 1860s and 1870s, when the Tweed Ring, Gold Ring, Whiskey Ring, and Bank Ring, among others, scandalized the public with smash and grab practices. In the Trump era, Paul Manafort's career and the president's family business share many similarities to these classic episodes, both in the contested origin of private wealth and the circulation of profits throughout the political system. Rings thus have a tendency to recur in American political development. When electoral politics becomes financialized, speculators may seize opportunities to extract a hefty surplus from the public domain. In premodern contexts, Max Weber called this plundering phenomenon “booty capitalism.” The variant specific to American electoral institutions highlights a periodic conflict in democratic capitalism that arises over the legitimacy of political wealth accumulation.

This article argues that reformers’ racial nativism, belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to reproductive and eugenic curriculum used by early public-school sex education programs. It utilizes newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the American Social Hygiene Association, Committee of Fourteen, United Neighborhood Houses, and Child Study Association in New York City to answer several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider as the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society? While the existing scholarship explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform, examining them separately downplays the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups worked across organizational lines to promote sex education.

This essay seeks to reinterpret both the gendered rhetoric of the First Red Scare as well as the reasons why many feminists came under attack in the years following World War I. It underscores the ways in which women's activist concerns were de-legitimized through accusations of Bolshevism, but also highlights the very real attractions that the Soviet system held for American women seeking peace, economic independence, voting rights, professional opportunity, and sexual freedom. Although a number of historians have demonstrated the ways in which a focus upon gender and women offers important insights into the First Red Scare, they have given only minimal attention to the Soviet Union's appeal, presumably wishing to avoid giving credence to inflammatory and exaggerated right-wing rhetoric. However, this tendency has the effect of distorting the historical record and, in particular, of eliding revolutionary Russia's role in fostering the American feminist imagination. Attention to several prominent targets of the First Red Scare, including Louise Bryant, Emma Goldman, and Rose Pastor Stokes, helps to clarify these dynamics.

This essay investigates how the repressive wartime political and social environment in World War I encouraged three key American social justice movements to devise new tactics and strategies to advance their respective causes. For the African American civil rights, female suffrage, and civil liberties movements, the First World War unintentionally provided fresh opportunities for movement building, a process that included recruiting members, refining ideological messaging, devising innovative media strategies, negotiating with the government, and participating in nonviolent street demonstrations. World War I thus represented an important moment in the histories of all three movements. The constructive, rather than destructive, impact of the war on social justice movements proved significant in the short term (for the suffragist movement) and the long term (for the civil rights and civil liberties movements). Ultimately, considering these three movements collectively offers new insights into American war culture and the history of social movements.

This essay analyzes white settler formations in the Southern Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. Occupied by the United States in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Muslim-majority regions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago became sites of colonial experimentation and reconfiguration. This led to a brief-but-concerted push by Euro-American fortune seekers to settle the “Muslim South.” Supported by U.S. policy makers and colonial officials, white colonists were drawn to Mindanao-Sulu by visions of permanent settlement and limitless economic opportunity. This analysis contends that settler attempts to build a “white man's country” in the Southern Philippines were shaped by vernaculars and modes of conquest developed on the continental frontier. It interrogates the creation of transoceanic frontier spaces in Mindanao-Sulu and the practical attempts to exploit them, which drew inspiration from diverse sources in the American West and across the colonized globe. In its study of settler fortunes and failures, the essay blurs distinctions between national and imperial peripheries, and contributes to a growing scholarly interest in reassessing the importance of U.S. extraterritorial possessions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the penultimate scene to D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, the normally composed and gentlemanly mulatto Lieutenant Governor Silas Lynch can no longer contain himself. He has become the leader of a rising “black South.” “[D]runk with wine and power,” his maddening ambition for political dominion seethes over into the ultimate desire that seems to drive any black male quest for authority throughout the film: Lynch exclaims, “I want to marry a white woman!” True to the deceptive nature of the duplicitous mulatto, he does not want to marry just any white woman but Elsie, the daughter of his abolitionist mentor, Austin Stoneman. Though Elsie comes from a lineage of radical advocates for equal rights, a proposal of marriage goes too far and she jerks away, offering him only a “horsewhipping for his insolence.” Lynch is outraged. Her rejection sends him into a lecherous frenzy, determined to abduct Elsie if she will not come willingly. For a moment, he regains some composure and with a snide veneer of arrogance, saunters over to the window and pulls back the curtain to reveal white residents cowering in fear to an overwhelming and bloodthirsty reign of black terror. Lynch points outside and proclaims: “See! My people fill the streets. With them I will build a Black Empire and you as a Queen shall sit by my side.”

From 1905–1920, American college and university students carried on active and understudied campaigns to gain legitimacy and support for women’s suffrage at institutions of higher education across the United States. The primary organization responsible for initiating and directing campus activism was the College Equal Suffrage League (CESL), formed in 1900 by Massachusetts teachers Maud Wood Park and Inez Haynes Gillmore to recruit more upper- and middle-class, well-educated, students and alumni to the women’s rights movement. Exploring the records of state and national suffragists, women’s organizations, and academic institutions associated with the CESL shows that the league’s campaigns helped to reinvigorate the suffrage cause at an important moment in the early twentieth century by using educational tactics as powerful tools to cultivate a scholarly voice for the campaign, appeal to the upper classes, and fit within the contexts of higher education and larger movement for progressive reform. In addition to influencing the suffrage cause, campus organizing for equal voting rights changed the culture of female political activism and higher education by ushering a younger generation of articulate and well-trained activists into the women’s rights campaign and starting in a trend of organized youth mobilization for women’s rights at colleges and universities.

This article examines the enclosure of the de facto commons that surrounded New Orleans during the final decades of the nineteenth century and argues that public parks were crucial tools deployed by civic elites on behalf of that initiative. As the regulatory efforts of reform-minded mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare failed to eliminate the persistent “cattle nuisance” that emanated from the undeveloped suburbs, he turned to parks as a means of fundamentally transforming the character of the land. By physically enclosing large swathes of acreage, conditioning the public to be urban subjects, and associating the area with leisure rather than agrarian production, the parks made it possible for the city’s modernizers to push dairy farmers out of the area and initiate a process of residential development. By examining this strategic use of greenspace in Gilded Age-era New Orleans, this article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which the urban environment was manipulated in service of the broader New South movement.