Beginning in the 1890s, the nature study movement advocated direct contact with the natural world to develop in children an appreciation for natural history, the beginnings of scientific inquiry, aesthetic and spiritual interests as well as the motivation to conserve nature. Defense of nature study pedagogy came from the theory of recapitulation. Recapitulation held that as humans developed they repeated the evolutionary history of the human race. Children were thus thought to be like Indians: primitive people with an innate closeness to nature. The most popular proponent of these ideas was Ernest Thompson Seton, widely read author, illustrator, and founder of the nature study boys club, the Woodcraft Indians. Nature study advocates hoped that the theory of recapitulation would allow them to bridge the modern and romantic, antimodern tendencies in their movement. Despite an intense focus on premodern virtues, nature study and the Woodcraft Indians mostly served to ease the tensions and incongruities of modern life.

The struggle over censorship stood at the core of the relationship between the political culture of progressivism and early moving pictures. Called by contemporaries and historians alike a democratic art, the moving pictures invited audiences to participate in the new mass culture of the early twentieth-century. As some early film makers began to use the medium to tell stories, those sitting in small theaters in towns and cities across America saw before them a make-believe world that was nonetheless plausible commentary on the past, the present, and the future. What remained unresolved was how those who championed political reforms, ostensibly in the language of progressive and democratic politics, might harness the power of the medium in redefining American political and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. They regarded the political potential of the moving pictures as essential to the empowerment of the masses in an age when social boundaries were in flux. At the same time, they tried and ultimately failed to extend to moving pictures the protection of the First Amendment. They did this because they believed in the political and artistic possibilities of the medium for a democratic culture. In creating a plan to elevate the moving pictures and their places of exhibition, they became locked in a confrontation with other reformers who feared the awesome power of the screen to hasten modernity and all that it implied.

Historians of the United States have for many decades termed the late nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” No consensus exists as to when this period began and ended, or how it might best be characterized. Most textbook authors place the origins of the Gilded Age around 1877 and its demise around 1900. Few would deny that this period witnessed a host of epochal innovations that included the rise of the modern industrial corporation, the building of large-scale technical systems, including the electric power grid, and the creation of governmental institutions that were conducive to rapid industrialization. Yet the significance of these innovations remained a matter of dispute.

In 1968 Outdoor Life ran a retrospective piece that examined the turn-of-the-century origins of this popular sportsmen's magazine. In the article, editor William Rae noted, with some dismay, that two out of the first three stories in the December 1905 issue featured women hunters, including the tale of a “tireless Diana” who left her corset at home in order to take to the fields. “One wonders,” Rae commented dryly, “whether men really were men in those days, as we have been led to believe.” Clearly, Rae found the spectacle of sport hunting women unusual, and he assumed that their presence in the pages of a hunting periodical called into question the masculinity of earlier sportsmen. The connection that Rae and Outdoor Life readers made in 1968 between hunting and masculinity remains a commonplace. As feminist scholar Mary Zeiss Stange argues, hunting “might be, in the popular mind, the most male-identified cultural pursuit.”

This study of the lives and careers of Claude C. Hopkins and Earnest Elmo Calkins from their boyhood experiences with periodical advertising in the 1870s though their professional contributions to the field at the turn of the century provides a ground-level view of modern advertising's emergence. Among other things, it shows that certain marketing concepts emerged earlier than is often assumed and that these concepts were often developed independent of major advertising agencies and far from the urban centers of advertising production. Calkins and Hopkins had very different philosophies of marketing, and between them they defined a spectrum of advertising message strategy that still characterizes the field. The happenstance that Hopkins and Calkins both wrote ads for the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, provides a symbolic center for this analysis that brings these developments into focus.

American Indian people fit poorly into the sweeping stories most commonly told about American history. Puritan-inspired stories of national origins and Turnerian frontier narratives cast Indians as outsiders whose role was to be dispossessed and then disappear. More recent counter-narratives of conquest and of redemptive struggles for citizenship allow Native actors important and autonomous roles, but are also premised on a teleology of assimilation and civil rights that flattens the complexity of Indian uses of U.S. citizenship rights. The history of the Society of American Indians, founded in 1911, shows how the paradox of Indian citizenship is central to stories about the broader sweep of U.S. historical practice.

First-wave feminists in the Progressive Era found ways to make the political physical by empowering their bodies. As the women's suffrage movement gained momentum, advocates for women's self-defense training in England and in the United States insisted that all women were physically capable of defending themselves and should learn self-defense not only to protect themselves physically but to empower themselves psychologically and politically for the battles they would face in both the public and private spheres. Militant suffragettes used their bodies to convey discontent and resist oppression through marches, pickets, and hunger strikes. Yet, and perhaps more importantly, even average women, with no direct association with suffrage organizations, expressed a newfound sense of empowerment through physical training in boxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu.1 This paper considers the ways in which women during the first wave of feminism empowered their bodies to fight assault, sexism, and disfranchisement through their training in the “manly art” of self-defense. Although not all women who embraced physical training and martial arts had explicit or implicit political motives, women's self-defense figuratively and literally challenged the power structure that prevented them from exercising their full rights as citizens and human beings.

The acquisition of an empire that stretched across North America, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific world transformed the United States during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. While scholars have examined many aspects of U.S. expansionism, a neglected issue involved the imperial labor migrations it required. From across North America, the Caribbean, southern Europe, and Asia, men and women were recruited to labor in the service of building U.S. global power at the turn of the twentieth century. Officials saw recruiting and moving laborers from far away as necessary to ensure productivity and discipline. This required U.S. government and corporate leaders to experiment with labor management in ways that shaped the “long twentieth century” of U.S. history. Mobility was not only central to the logic of the U.S. Empire; when possible, workers also deployed it for their own ends. Therefore migration became a terrain of struggle between workers and government officials. This paper looks in particular at documents generated by two migrating groups important in the making of U.S. global power. Afro-Caribbeans who traveled to construct the Panama Canal; and soldiers who served in the War of 1898 and the Philippine-American War.

This article examines the mutually reinforcing imperatives of government science, capitalism, and American empire through a history of the U.S. Weather Bureau's West Indian weather service at the turn of the twentieth century. The original impetus for expanding American meteorological infrastructure into the Caribbean in 1898 was to protect naval vessels from hurricanes, but what began as a measure of military security became, within a year, an instrument of economic expansion that extracted climatological data and produced agricultural reports for American investors. This article argues that the West Indian weather service was a project of imperial meteorology that sought to impose a rational scientific and bureaucratic order on a region that American officials considered racially and culturally inferior, yet relied on the labor of local observers and Cuban meteorological experts in order to do so. Weather reporting networks are examined as a material and symbolic extension of American technoscientific power into the Caribbean and as a knowledge infrastructure that linked the production of agricultural commodities in Cuba and Puerto Rico to the world of commodity exchange in the United States.

In 1886, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court struck down a law that prohibited employers from paying wages in company store scrip and mandated monthly wage payments. The court held that the legislature could not prescribe mandatory wage contracts for legally competent workingmen. The decision quashed over two decades of efforts to end the “truck system.” Although legislators had agreed that wage payments redeemable only in company store goods appeared antithetical to the free labor wage system, two obstacles complicated legislative action. Any law meant to enhance laborers' rights could neither favor one class over another nor infringe any workingman's ability to make voluntary contracts. These distinctions, however, were not as rigid and laissez faire-oriented as depicted by conventional history. Labor reformers argued that principles of equity must supplement these categories of class legislation and contract freedom. This essay explores how legal doctrine helped both sides of the anti-truck debate articulate the contested meanings of liberty. Ultimately, the Godcharles ruling enshrined the specialness of workingmen's labor contracts and rejected the use of equity principles to justify contract regulations, but the controversy also informed future labor strategies, especially the turn to state police powers as the rubric under which workers' safety, morals, and health could be protected.

[Note: What follows is a selection from a recent exhibition on Gilded Age political cartooning at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, a sponsoring institution of Shgape and this journal from their inception. As the essay explains, the Hayes Center's first-rate research library includes many sources for scholarship on this craft, which thrived during the late 1800s. In this illustrated essay, Hayes Center director Tom Culbertson, an avid scholar of political cartooning, provides background information on major personalities of Gilded Age political cartooning, their publications, politics, mindset, and techniques. Appearing in weekly magazines, frequently filling a full page and printed in color, drawn in copious detail and finely engraved, Gilded Age cartoons represented a lavish, at times gaudy form of political expression to which this six-by-nine inch, black-and-white journal cannot do justice. Teachers and scholars routinely use such cartoons to illustrate other points without much thought to the circumstances of their drawing and printing. Superficially familiar, these cartoons take on new life when seen in their original form and setting.]

People in the United States and other countries, if they know anything about Woodrow Wilson, identify this American president with the League of Nations. They regard his role in its creation as his major contribution to world history. Beyond this general consensus, however, there is considerable disagreement.

The contemporary politicization of sexualities has deep roots in the previous fin de siècle. Then as now, conflicts over sex acts and sexual identities were central points of articulation in a wide-ranging struggle over just how to produce, reproduce, and embody a moral and humane society. Like scholars of other western, industrialized nations, historians of the United States have identified the turn of the twentieth century as an important period of change in sexual ideology and practice. For decades, the chief framework for understanding this watershed has been a transition from “Victorian” to “modern” mores. One of the most sophisticated renderings of this transition appears in John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters, a comprehensive survey of U.S. sexual history. The authors identify a shift from family- and reproduction-oriented sexual practices to “sexual liberalism,” the idea that sexual preferences and pleasures stand at the center of individual selfhood.

In the late 1910s and early 1920s, a succession of popular books decried the impact that “new” immigrants were having on the United States. Fearing that the racial quality of the American people was being eroded by the large number of immigrants that had been arriving in the previous decades, the books clamored for radical restrictions on the number of immigrants the country should admit. These books reflect the pervasiveness of the belief that new immigrants were biologically inferior to older immigrants and native-born Anglo-Saxons. This belief, in turn, was rooted in a theory of permanently fixed racial identities that had been circulating throughout Europe and the United States for decades, despite cautions of professional scientists who argued that these theories were not “proven.” Yet non-scientists like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard were the ones who enjoyed widespread public authority on such complex scientific theories as heredity, genetics, and eugenics because they explained these difficult subjects in easily understandable terms–despite the fact that they grossly over-simplified the theories. Simultaneously, they raised shrill cries that these new arrivals thus threatened the “superior” racial stock of America. The anti-immigrant wave that Grant, Stoddard, and others fanned was based on what Grant described as “the science of race,” which he claimed proved “the immutability of somatological or bodily characters.”

“Actresses as a rule know no more about making themselves beautiful than does the average woman; neither are they naturally more beautiful,” wrote actress Margaret Illington Banes in a 1912 article entitled “The Mad Search for Beauty.” “The truth of the matter is,” she continued, “that no actress—or any woman—can impart the secrets of beauty to another, any more than the rich man can impart the secrets of business success to some other man.” Disturbed by recent trends in the theatrical profession that required actresses to present themselves as “beauty specialists,” Banes sought to expose the constructed nature of their on- and offstage performances. Stage stars captivated audiences because they had numerous opportunities to appear onstage dressed in the height of style; “under the same circumstances,” she concluded, most women “would look quite as well.”

For many us who have studied, researched, written, and taught about the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, the current period of the global viral pandemic is eerily and unpleasantly familiar. Today, the rapid global spread of a virus has prompted policies calling for widespread closures, social distancing, constant handwashing, and public mask wearing in additional to other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). We have also seen pushback and resistance to these directives as well as substantial mismanagement of resources and a flood of misinformation. Much health policy has been inconsistently set at the local rather than federal level. These responses to our current pandemic closely mirror those to the pandemic 102 years ago.

British and American intellectuals began to formulate ideas about so-called great books from the mid-1800s to 1920. English critic Matthew Arnold's writings served as the fountainhead of ideas about the “best” books. But rather than simply buttress the opinions of highbrow cultural elites, he also inspired those with dreams of a democratized culture. From Arnold and from efforts such as Sir John Lubbock's “100 Best Books,” the pursuit of the “best” in books spread in both Victorian Britain and the United States. The phrase “great books” gained currency in the midst of profound technical, cultural, educational, and philosophical changes. Victorian-era literature professors in America rooted the idea in both education and popular culture through their encouragements to read. Finally, the idea explicitly took hold on college campuses, first with Charles Mills Gayley at the University of California at Berkeley and then John Erskine's General Honors seminar at Columbia University.

Two historic moments from the run-up to the 2012 presidential election might well stir the interest of readers of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:

December 6, 2011: President Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver what proved to be his signature speech about the economy. Indeed, former labor secretary Robert Reich called the address, “the most important economic speech of his or any modern presidency.” Obama castigated radical free marketeers, he vindicated communal bonds, and he upheld the great middle class. And the reason that the president traveled to the metropolis of Osawatomie? Because in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt had gone there to repudiate the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age and put forth his case for a progressive “New Nationalism” in an oration that White House press secretary Jay Carney characterized as “the speech that really set the course for the 20th century.”

The largest organization of capitalists during the Progressive Era was one that most American historians have never heard of. Motivated primarily by overproduction and ruthless competition, many of the nation's largest manufacturers, distributors, and commercial banks formed the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 to reduce the supply of credit available to retailers and consumers. The story of the Credit Men confirms many standard assumptions regarding the rise of corporate America to economic power and cultural legitimacy while challenging others. Advances in technology and salaried organization made possible their mobilization, yet more important was the significant lag in the development of mass retail institutions and consequently mass consumerism behind mass production and distribution. The NACM deployed standardized methods and hungered for administrative efficiency but used these modern tools to instill order and ethical discipline in the nation's business, not to secularize the economy and culture of the new century. America's corporate capitalists seized power by promising moral regulation for unbridled individualism.