This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.

While historians have recently called attention to the racial assumptions that shaped the debates over monetary reform in either the colonial Philippines or China during the first years of the twentieth century, this article analyzes the crosscurrents between efforts to “civilize” and “develop” Filipino and Chinese monetary systems. It first examines the history of the Philippine money question (1899–1903), revealing anxieties about the apparent attachment Native Filipinos and Chinese had to silver currency. U.S. colonial officials were ambivalent toward the Native Filipinos, seeing them as possibly teachable, but so-called silver savagism was seen as too deeply engrained in the Chinese community, making the Chinese appear as a threat to monetary stability. In the last section, the article turns to China, revealing how the outcome of the Philippine money question shaped how U.S. monetary experts approached their efforts to reform China’s monetary system. Throughout this process, U.S. colonial officials and monetary experts defined the Philippines and China (“silver countries”) and Filipinos and Chinese (“silver-handling types”) as overlapping objects of development. This analysis reveals how development was simultaneously an economic, racial, and imperial language.

This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political entities, including all three branches of government, took in response to Diggs and Caminetti’s actions highlights some of the major social changes gripping the nation. Moral panics can be investigated as crucial historical sites of contestation, revealing efforts to neutralize or turn back the societal changes perceived to be the greatest threat to the prevailing social power structure—in this case foreigners, the new leisure culture, the liberalization of sexual attitudes, and the threat of female independence. Understanding the origins and repercussions of past moral panics can help identify, understand, and possibly defuse future panics.

This essay examines the efforts of Upton Sinclair and Ernest Poole to connect their respective novels The Jungle and The Harbor to the nineteenth-century sentimental literary tradition, as well as their leftist allies’ reception of those efforts. Sinclair consistently presented The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, capable of moving readers to agitate on behalf of working-class immigrants, while Poole engaged reflexively with the tropes and traditions of sentimentalism in order to model for his readers how they should respond to The Harbor. Although both novels became bestsellers and influenced later writers of proletarian fiction, early leftist critics dismissed Sinclair and Poole’s sentimentalism as aesthetically simplistic and politically naïve. This essay turns instead to a slightly later contemporary of those critics, Antonio Gramsci, whose prison writings argue for the revolutionary potential of sentimentalism. Reading The Jungle and The Harbor through the lens of Gramsci’s analysis of organic intellectuals and the cathartic power of popular literary forms, this essay contends, resolves many of the problems those early critics identified in the novels.

An analysis of Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveals how popular literature can serve as an important introduction to signature issues of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration are highlighted in the novel—as well as attendant problems including poverty, machine politics, child labor, and prejudice and discrimination. Profound ignorance about sexuality and conception abound in a religious culture that made premarital sex and birth control sinful and shameful, with unhappy marriages and unwanted children the result. As poverty and deviant sexuality abound, eugenics is touted as a sensible solution. The novel helps to explain why there was no organized rebellion or revolution when the struggling poor found that the promise of upward mobility was elusive. Characters have differing definitions of the American Dream. Some seek respite in religion, leisure activities, or alcohol. Others find hope in a variety of reform measures, including public health and education, settlement houses, and unions. The novel ends as the technology that made the nation’s industrialization and urbanization possible continues to produce new marvels that will transform the lives of the urban poor, bringing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to a close.

This article describes the methods and arguments of Hearing the Americas, a digital public history project that illuminates the history of popular music and the recording industry from 1890 to 1925. We argue that the use of digital tools allows the website to integrate sound directly into writing on music and thereby explicate a series of historical arguments. The article examines three arguments advanced by Hearing the Americas, showing in each case how digital tools generate new insights. The first case uses mapping to reveal some of the specific ways in which the economic and social context of Jim Crow shaped the experiences of Black performers; the second integrates sound and text to reveal the origins of certain blues conventions in the racist stereotypes of minstrel shows; and the final case uses digital tools to argue that the marketing strategies of the recording industry throughout the Americas helped produce a key shift in patterns of globalization.

This roundtable reflects on the 25th anniversary of the publication of Daniel T. Rodgers’s Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Harvard, 1998), a classic in our field.

This introduction to the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s special issue, “New Approaches to Music and Sound,” provides a historical sketch of American music and the American soundscape at the turn of the twentieth century. It also offers a discussion of relevant historiography, taking stock of recent work in sound studies and its influence on research on music and sound of the period. Finally, it introduces the four research articles featured in this special issue and marks their contributions to our understandings of listening practices, normative understandings of audition and speech, and the sonic dimensions of politics and capitalism, race and national identity, imaginings of the past and visions for the future in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At first glance, international arbitration—a legalistic method for the peaceful settlement of disputes among nations—may seem like a topic belonging only to the formal, male-dominated realms of diplomacy and international law. Most men in the late nineteenth century certainly thought so, and many historians since have treated it as such. But prominent women like May Wright Sewall and Belva Lockwood, and mass organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, took a lively interest in the subject in the 1890s. In that interest lay the roots of women’s foreign policy activism that led to their participation in debates over the War of 1898 and their peace efforts during and after World War I. International arbitration appealed to women because it complemented their better-known campaigns for temperance, suffrage, and other causes. As a more “civilized” method of resolving conflicts, arbitration was both a symbol of and a prerequisite for a more advanced, temperate, and equal society. It thus became a key component of women’s arguments for inclusion in the public and political life of the nation.

From 1877 to 1896, Maine courts sentenced six women accused of infanticide to imprisonment for life. This harsh punishment was in stark contrast to the more lenient punishments given infanticides elsewhere. A close look at these cases through court documents, newspaper accounts, pardon petitions, and attorney general reports suggests that the trials marked a shift in the justice system in Maine as the state increasingly asserted its control over the communities’ response to crime. Historically, women’s expertise with regard to women’s bodies provided a place for them within the local legal system. Under the purview of the state’s attorneys general, the state increasingly assumed control over the detection, adjudication, and punishment of crime. While community members responded to crime with attention to the individual and the circumstances, the state called for the universal application of the written law regardless of the context and claimed that swift and inevitable retribution was necessary to protect all. This shift from the local to the state had a particular impact on women and their role within the community. Long accustomed to arbitrating issues surrounding pregnancy, women found their power to do so subverted and replaced by middle class professionals in distant urban locations.

The entry of the United States into the First World War and the integration of women into mobilization expanded women-run private initiatives and integrated their associational efforts into the war effort. This created greater visibility of women and children to state and federal governments. In the end, however, the increased attention and mobilization of private organizations by the state around women’s issues was fleeting. The alacrity with which North Carolina dispensed with these mechanisms for mobilization is an example of their purpose as associational measures to manage the dynamics of wartime and maintain pre-war hierarchies of power. Throughout the war, the bifurcation of work based on gender and the unfixed status of women created a situation in which their participation required constant negotiation. The need to negotiate participation in the mobilization was itself an outgrowth of the conflicted relationship between American government and civil society over women’s issues. After the war, these issues again became the purview of private organizations and other systems of extra-governmental governance that leveraged a more associational relationship with federal and state governments.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Socialists in Wisconsin experienced a “golden age” of political successes in the state legislature. Whereas the 1920s are commonly seen as a period of socialist decline, Wisconsin Socialists entered the decade with a renewed sense of optimism. Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party. Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition. Socialists were vital to progressive reform prior to World War I; however, the Socialist-Progressive alliance reached its full potential in the 1920s. From 1919–31, the Wisconsin legislature passed 295 Socialist-authored pieces of legislation ranging from labor demands, public utilities, and criminal justice reform. Many of the proposals resulted from negotiations between the Socialist and Progressive caucuses. The success of the Wisconsin Socialists—and their alliance with progressive Republicans—suggests that at least in some places the Progressive Era extended into the 1920s.

Historians have correctly interpreted the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as periods in which African Americans faced unpreceded violence, a significant decline in franchise, and the loss of many civil rights. These years however, were far more complex when viewed from the vantage point of African American families who attempted to empower themselves through education, securing employment in white-collar occupations, such as teaching, and working to advance themselves through race betterment groups, including women’s clubs and civil rights organizations. Yet some middle-class Black families like the Stewarts not only rejected white society’s widely held belief of Blacks as racially inferior and incapable of progress. They also embraced migration as a constructive strategy to advance their individual careers and to elevate the race. In an era when the majority of Black workers had minimal literacy and worked unskilled menial jobs, T. McCants Stewart and his children each graduated from college or professional school, worked in white-collar or professional jobs, and paved the way for the next generation. Yet each also understood that migration outside of the Jim Crow South, including to Africa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the territory of Hawaii, held the key to their success. Thus, the Stewarts constructed a new vision of freedom and opportunity and believed that even despite the repressive conditions imposed upon Blacks during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era that there was room for growth and an opportunity to advance their careers. Migration, therefore, should be reconsidered as a viable strategy that some Black families adopted to find their place in American society.

As historians have begun to conceptualize the U.S. Civil War as a global event, so too must they consider Reconstruction as a political process that transcended national boundaries. The United States and Colombia both abolished slavery during civil wars; ex-slaves in both societies struggled for full citizenship and landholding, partially succeeding for a time; in both societies, a harsh reaction ripped full citizenship from the freedpeople and denied their claims to the land. These events, usually studied only as part of a national story in either the United States or Colombia, can also be understood, and perhaps be better understood, as a history of hemispheric and transnational processes—of race, of republican politics, of contests over equality, of capitalism. This essay examines the words and actions of historical actors, especially U.S. African Americans and afrocolombianos, to note the impressive commonalities of discourse (which was almost exactly the same in many cases) and political repertoires. This article focuses first on the agency of African Americans in both societies to create post-emancipation social movements for citizenship and land and then on the, largely successful, reactions against these movements.

This roundtable takes up old themes and new perspectives in the field of political history. Scholars engage with six questions across three main categories: the scope of the field, current debates, and teaching. The first two questions ask how we should think about political power and the boundaries of what constitute political history. The section on current debates interrogates the relationship between governing and social movements during the GAPE, and how to situate the political violence of the January 6, 2021, Capitol Hill riot in historical perspective. The final section on teaching takes up two very different challenges. One question is a perennial concern about connecting with students in the classroom about political history. The other dilemma is how to respond to the growing cascade of censorship laws passed by state legislatures that prohibit the teaching of so-called “divisive concepts.”

Racial mapping during the Progressive Era played into the political narratives of eugenic intervention and immigration restriction. This article argues that the racial cartographic work of the Yale geographer and prolific eugenicist Ellsworth Huntington was both developed within and contributed to this racist milieu. Huntington’s middle-class and educated upbringing, his familial history, and his expertise as a well-travelled geographer all conspired to shape his views on eugenics, race, and immigration. By applying the critical cartographic theories of John Brian Harley, Denis Wood, Heather Winlow, and others, I show that Huntington’s racial maps were a product of his cultural and political environment. The success of a map’s impact was often due to maps being seen as objective depictions of spatial variation. Indeed, for Huntington they performed an essential role in communicating and portraying racial information. But, as I argue, they were susceptible to bias, misunderstanding, and intentional manipulation. I show that Huntington’s maps are not accurate snapshots of reality, but rather cultural texts or rhetorical images intended to create a narrative and convince the reader of a particular subjective point of view.

This article reveals the history of the unstudied “Indian Colony” of Gilded Age New York City through the life of its founder and governor, Harriet Maxwell Converse. Converse was a white woman adopted by the Senecas and a salvage ethnographer, a potent combination of Indigenous “authenticity” and scholarly authority that made her an object of fascination to white New Yorkers who read about her in extensive newspaper coverage. The Colony itself was composed of boarding houses, Converse’s own townhouse-turned-museum, and was connected to the New York Police Department. It provided housing and support to resident and visiting Native Americans who found work in the city’s “Indian trade” and booming entertainment industry.

By highlighting the extensive newspaper coverage of Converse and her Colony, this article reveals a hidden history of the Indigenous people who lived and worked in the city. It also pushes the periodization of the earliest urban Indian communities backward in time by more than a decade and shows how the media fused the daily life of Converse and the Colonists with popular stereotypes of “savage” and “vanished” Indians, immigrant stereotypes, assimilation, gendered expectations, and the predatory academic desires of museums and salvage ethnographers.

This article examines American travel and performance in Britain in the decades prior to the First World War, arguing that the expression of nationality in this transatlantic context played a profound role in formulating both America’s dominant culture and a culture of opposition advanced by African American performers. It explores this “oppositional” culture in detail, focusing on the transatlantic work of Ida B. Wells and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Both found a sympathetic audience across the Atlantic at a time of increased repression at home. British support opened new avenues for these activists, but also limited the rhetorical possibilities of their work. By bringing into conversation previously separate historiographies on early waves of “Americanization,” the transnational dimensions of various reform movements and the international formation of the Black Atlantic, it illustrates the economic, infrastructural, and racial inequalities that shaped the United States’ emerging national culture.

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires.