This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.

This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

On October 1, 1898, twenty-year-old laborer Peter Dumbrowski married Lettie, a girl from his Detroit neighborhood. Both of their Polish immigrant families had left their new Canadian homes in 1881, joining thousands of other families who had already moved south for the promise of good wages in an emerging city. The following summer, at the age of seventeen, Lettie gave birth to their first daughter and would soon be pregnant with a son. Peter earned enough as a metalworker to support the small family as well as make a down payment toward the purchase of a six-room home on the west side. By Peter's fortieth birthday, he could claim that he made thirty dollars a week at one of Detroit's most important employers of men, Timken Detroit Axle. His eldest son, now sixteen, contributed to the family economy most of his salary (twenty dollars per week) from another key operation, Insulated Wire Works.

This article examines the experience of distinct groups within the Socialist Party of America, considering the period from its founding in 1901 to the eve of World War One. The Socialist Party, befitting its membership in the international socialist movement of that era, was committed to representing the workers of the world in the Marxist struggle to achieve political and economic equality within a cooperative commonwealth. Accordingly, variables of gender, ethnicity and race were subsumed within the Social Question. Ideally, workers in every capacity and of all backgrounds would march together under the Red Flag and create a new egalitarian society. While, indeed, many lawyers, ministers and others of the middle-class belonged to the Socialist Party and often held office within it, thereby derisively being likened by critics to an assemblage of dentists, the party was very much working class in composition, as shown by James R. Green and others.

A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.

James Brown Scott played a key role in the growth of public international law in the United States from the 1890s to the 1940s. While little remembered today, he was well-known among his contemporaries as a leading spokesman for a new and important discipline. Scott rose from obscure middle-class origins to occupy a prominent and influential place as an international lawyer who shared his legal expertise with seven presidents and ten secretaries of state. By examining his life we gain insight into the establishment of public international law as a discipline and on the era when lawyers qua lawyers began to help shape American foreign policy.

For years, scholars of Native American history have urged U. S. historians to integrate Indians into national narratives, explaining that Indians' experiences are central to the collective story rather than peripheral to it. They have achieved some successes in penetrating and reworking traditional European-American dominated accounts. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the field of colonial history. In fact, for several decades now colonialists have placed Native Americans at the center, seeing them as integral to imperial processes and as forces that simply can no longer be ignored. To omit them would be to leave out not only crucial participants but important themes. Native people occupied and owned the property European nations coveted. They consequently suffered great losses as imperialists bent on control of land, resources, cultures, and even souls applied their demographic and technological advantages. But conquest did not occur overnight. It took several centuries for Spain, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain, and eventually the United States to achieve continental and hemispheric dominance. Nor was it ever totally achieved. That 564 officially recognized tribes exist in the early 2000s in the United States demonstrates that complete conquest was never realized.

This essay explores the impact of the First Red Scare on immigrant populations, focusing on the function that detentions, deportations, and attempted deportations occupied within the broader antiradical politics of the period. I assert that deportations were far more than an instrumentalist tactic of the Red Scare, but instead, were part of a much longer trajectory of expanding anti-immigrant enforcement and the postentry social control of foreign-born residents. Antiradical raids during the era have held a prominent place in the scholarly imagination, which has remained overly constrained by the exceptionalist and episodic narratives put forth by its earliest historians. I trace the evolution of scholarship on the Red Scare's temporal boundaries, the motivations for targeting immigrants, and the debates over how radical a rupture this period represented from earlier practices of antiradicalism and anti-immigrant politics. In doing so, I argue that Red Scare deportations must be understood in relationship to the broader deportation practices of the period and the rapid (and more consistent) growth of removals instigated because of racialized criteria of poverty, crime, health, or violations of an ever-stricter border regime.

For Massachusetts children, including those in the city of Lynn, December 8, 1908 was a date of particular importance. That day their fathers voted whether their city would accept the new state playground law. The law required cities and towns with over 10,000 residents to provide and maintain playgrounds for the “recreation and physical education of minors.” In Lynn, as in other cities, a high level of publicity surrounded the referendum. Editorials and front-page advertisements ran in the local papers, and posters hung in business windows. Even children participated. On election day, members of the Lynn Boys' Club paraded the streets wearing banners that proclaimed, “Vote for playgrounds for me.” The triumphant “yes” vote of 11,122 to 1,083 set a Lynn record for the first time the citizens had ever turned in a vote that reached five figures. By March 1909, thirty-nine Massachusetts cities and towns had held referendums; all but two agreed to impose the new law on themselves.

The conundrum of Progressive Era reform flowering simultaneously with the institutionalization of Jim Crow, the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone, and the introduction of European immigration restriction fascinates historians, even as it agitates them. From a contemporary, post-civil-rights-era perspective there is something deeply disturbing—and disappointing—about progressivism and racial and ethnic bigotry apparently going hand in hand. Was progressivism inherently racist and ethnically chauvinistic, or are we dealing simply with a case of practically minded politicians bowing to bigotry to achieve political results? An investigation of the ethnic and racial side of Robert M. La Follette Sr. hardly promises to answer this question fully. The progressive movement remains well-nigh impossible to pin down in exact analytical terms. Still, it may be argued that La Follette was an unusually uncompromising politician who proved willing, at least during the latter part of his career, to sacrifice practical results for idealistic principles. If La Follette's progressivism was of a purer strain than that of many a result-oriented pragmatic politician, was it less bigoted?

The Tweed Ring spawned a vibrant financial sector that was integral to its brief success but has never been previously examined. William “Boss” Tweed and his allies employed banks controlled or comanaged by Tammany politicians to embezzle funds, build political alliances, and invest in a wide array of business ventures. The capital of these savings and commercial banks—city money, deposits from Catholic charities, and the savings of immigrant laborers—was accumulated through political channels. During their operation between 1867 and 1871, politician-bankers engaged in a mix of patronage deals and profit-driven financial speculation. In effect, Tammany banks were ground zero for the Ring's conversion of political hegemony into a windfall of economic capital that fueled party activities and buoyed personal fortunes. Importantly, the anti-Ring mobilization by upper-class reformers was more than a revolt of wealthy taxpayers concerned with abstract goals of good government or rescuing city credit; it was also a reaction by old-line bankers in direct competition with Tammany upstarts. A dramatic bank run catalyzed by reformers in November 1871 drove them into bankruptcy, bringing this novel experiment in political capitalism to an end.

Harry H. Laughlin's main claim to fame was as director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, from which position he exerted considerable influence upon early twentieth-century campaigns to restrict immigration and to institute compulsory sterilization of the socially inadequate. Laughlin also had an absorbing fascination for the idea of a single world government. Over the course of forty years, he produced a voluminous body of mostly unpublished work on the subject. In examining Laughlin's musings on internationalism, this article provides a glimpse into how a leading American eugenicist would have projected onto the world stage the policies he was zealously endeavoring to implement at the domestic level. Laughlin sent samples of his work to many of America's leading internationalists. Their responses to Laughlin's ideas reveal much about the character of internationalism in the United States during the era of World War I, especially the extent to which his racist and imperialist assumptions were shared by other members of the internationalist movement. Consequently, this article provides yet another example of how liberal and conservative impulses were neither easily distinguishable nor mutually exclusive during the Progressive Era.

U.S.food prices surged abruptly higher in 1910–1913, alarming urban consumers, who equated them with the high cost of living, but delighting farmers. Progressive reformers tackled detailed aspects of the food-price problem but had no overarching solution and no effective programs t o please both consumers and farmers. A volatile pattern of economic voting resulted, but unlike conventional models, it had countervailing tendencies, setting consumers against food producers. Food prices cost the Republicans heavily in the 1910 election and helped disrupt the party by 1912, ending the Republican “system of 1896.” In power, Democrats pursued primarily a southern-tinged agrarian agenda and narrowly preserved power through 1914 and 1916 but fell victim to interest-group conflicts in 1918 and economic disasters in 1920.

This essay examines three schools in New York City—the City and Country School founded in 1914—and two founded in 1974 and 1984—Central Park East Elementary School 1 and Central Park East Secondary School—with respect to how they reflected Deweyan pedagogic practices and Dewey's belief in democratic education.1 It analyzes whether such pedagogic practices can be maintained over time. City and Country, founded by Caroline Pratt, reflected many of Dewey's ideas and remains true to its founder's vision today. CPE 1 founded by Deborah Meier with five teachers reflected the progressive ideas of its founder, many of which were consistent with Deweyan philosophy. It remains progressive although there have been recent attempts to make it more traditional. CPESS, founded by Deborah Meier, reflected both Deweyan philosophy and the ideas of Theodore Sizer. After Meier left in the 1990s, the school became less progressive and eventually was closed and then reopened as a traditional high school. These histories indicate that Dewey's work on education was at the core of all of these schools’ philosophies and practices. Although there have been uneven successes in keeping Dewey's progressive practices alive, they demonstrate that Dewey's work is relevant and is being practiced today.

Armed with volumes of Greek and Latin classics, James Loeb waged a gentleman's war. He took aim at what the modern world prized and with the ammunition of antiquity he sought to defeat it. Specifically, in 1912, he inaugurated the publication of his eponymous classical library of ancient texts and facing-page English translations. The Loeb Classical Library, numbering in the hundreds of volumes, collected into one series all the important works and many obscure texts from antiquity. With the same popularizing instinct that guided other purveyors of middlebrow culture, Loeb aimed to connect a general audience with its classical heritage. With his set of compact green and red volumes whose publication he funded, Loeb saw himself as a warrior in the centuries-long battle between the ancients and the moderns.

When historians describe the American woman who served overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, they typically fall back on generalizations. The American women who served “over there” were white, single, well-educated, and from an urban area of the Northeast or West Coast of the United States. Most were gainfully employed before going to Europe, holding a teaching, clerical, or other position suitable for respectable white women of that period. Frequently, they were financially independent and lived on their own. While such generalizations are valuable, their obvious drawback is that they obscure the diversity of women serving in specific organizations. Also, such generalizations can prove misleading when applied to any one organization; what might be true for a YMCA worker might be false for a telephone operator.

This story of Dewey's disciples in the New South presents two major themes rarely seen in current literature about the South or about the Progressive Era: the influence of educational philosopher John Dewey in the region and the struggles of his disciples—the southern women educators who were major influential forces in reshaping the area's educational systems. These themes come together to produce an unusual and instructive story about these female leaders of southern educational reform during the Progressive Era. In an attempt to correct what educational historian Clarence Karier calls an “inexcusable omission,” this paper showcases two women who were not silenced during their leadership tenure but have since become so, by time and by the masculine interpretation of educational history.

Published in 1963 and with a second edition in 2013, Walter Nugent's The Tolerant Populists challenged and overturned an interpretation of the American Populist movement, largely associated with Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, which portrayed the People's Party as backward looking, reactionary, irrational, antisemitic, and nativist. The Tolerant Populists demonstrated the Populist movement to be forward looking in its advocacy of statist economic reforms later adopted by progressives. In addition to this particular intervention in the literature, The Tolerant Populists, as it marked a turn in the 1960s to writing history from the bottom up, also more generally shaped the historiography of Populism by emphasizing the local social, cultural, and political roots of the movement; the movement's appeal to marginalized Americans in the 1890s; and the reasonableness of its policy measures to ease economic suffering. Moreover, the new edition critiques the continued use in popular media of lower-case “populism” to describe modern anti-statist movements that bear no resemblance to the movement of the 1890s. Finally, Walter Nugent forwarded the historiographical emphases in The Tolerant Populists to influence, in his later scholarship, the wider history of monetary policy, American demographic and social history, immigration, the American West, and American empire building.