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.

The figure of Anthony Comstock may seem like an odd historical relic: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer from a bygone past. And yet, because his namesake act has been revived as a potential strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke. Today, some Americans see the Comstock Act, passed by Congress in 1873, as a pathway to banning abortion and other reproductive care, effectively jettisoning any need for new Supreme Court abortion rulings or congressional legislation. As scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, we are uniquely situated to intervene in this dialogue and ensure that contemporary conversations are grounded in historical context. We present this forum not as an exhaustive account of the Comstock Act and its architect, but as aopportunity to highlight the context in which this law, which holds so much potential relevance for our present, was created, enacted, enforced, and challenged. We hope this forum will stimulate further scholarly and public conversations around the nation’s long history of regulating reproductive rights and how that history became entangled with other social anxieties.

In the late nineteenth-century United States, kerosene became a universal illuminant for artificial lighting, providing its users with a shared material environment. While kerosene users employed the fluid not only for lighting but also for washing, cooking, and cleaning, they had to deal with the material’s risks, such as fires and explosions. With the help of chemists and domestic advisors, American consumers adapted to this ambivalent material condition, weaving kerosene into their economic life and social thought. In so doing, some consumers identified as a “professional class” that navigated within this material environment through their own expertise—which paralleled their economic struggle within a rapidly growing but volatile political economy during the Gilded Age. As Standard Oil’s monopolization of the kerosene business became a substantial issue in national politics, this social consciousness among kerosene users attracted anti-monopolists like Ida Tarbell. Because Standard Oil had lowered the consumer price, these reformers sought an alternative rationale to persuade kerosene-consuming households to participate in the antitrust movement against the company. Examining how these progressive reformers turned kerosene consumers’ social identity to their political ends, this article sheds new light on the relationship between the energy transition, consumer culture, and American capitalism.

The cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.

It is best to think of Anthony Comstock’s campaign against vice as a response to Reconstruction that afflicted the nation long after that period was over. Comstock’s rise in the 1870s was not organic; it was backed by wealthy patrons engaged in intense political fighting over issues such as racial equality, taxation, and democracy. And although Comstock began by arresting vendors of so-called obscene goods, he soon expanded his portfolio, pursuing folks of every race and gender engaged in erotic, profane, or blasphemous correspondence. Interfering in personal conversations proved controversial, resulting in attempts by courts and postmasters to restrain Comstock’s authority, but he, nevertheless, prosecuted countless letter writers. The law that bore his name resulted in federal involvement in private correspondence well into the twentieth century.

The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban.1 This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past.2 The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.3 It contained provisions for outlawing abortion and contraception, but the bill’s author, Anthony Comstock, along with his fellow vice crusaders, were mostly concerned about controlling illicit sexuality and censoring sexual material. From the beginning, the law was inconsistently and less often applied to violations involving abortion and contraception than it was against other forms of obscenity.4

Beginning in 1867 with the invention of the miniature (or “hobby”) press, young people in the United States began to publish their own amateur newspapers. Within the pages of those publications, adolescents included news articles, editorials, short stories, serialized fiction, poetry, and jokes. The collective result of their literary efforts was referred to as Amateurdom, or “the ’Dom” for short. Included in this teaching supplement are several representative short stories and editorials published by adolescents during the 1870s and 1880s. After reading the primary source material, students might be prompted to address some the questions for discussion included below.

Charles Eastman’s “The North American Indian” address for the 1911 Universal Races Congress (URC) in London provides multiple pathways for teaching in a comparative context. One productive approach involves setting the lecture in dialogue with Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star, published in the same year. Another entails asking students to situate Charles Eastman’s talk in the context of the URC as a vital milestone in global thought leaders’ engagement with questions about race. This approach could include juxtaposing Eastman’s lecture with one by W. E. B. Du Bois delivered at the same convention. Pedagogy for Eastman’s speech can also locate this text in the context of his larger oeuvre, including more assertively anticolonial discourse in later writings for Indigenous readers.

Anthony Comstock is synonymous with the Gilded Age crusade against vice. The 1873 “Act of the Suppression of the Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use” – better known, then and now, as the “Comstock Act” – secured its namesake’s enduring notoriety. Most federal laws with an appellation honor a congressional sponsor, or, in more recent years, a victim of the issue that the law aims to address. Only the Comstock Act memorializes a man who was both the chief civilian proponent of its passage and the government bureaucrat tasked with its enforcement.1

Victoria Woodhull was Mrs. Satan. Or at least that is what Harper’s Weekly wanted its readers to see. The popular New York City-based paper published a full-page engraving, by its most famous artist, of Woodhull as the biblical devil in February 1872 (Figure 2). Horns curl away from her skull and spiked wings stand almost as tall as she does. Anthony Comstock, an evangelical Christian who made it his mission to protect public morals, almost certainly imagined the woman who promoted free love as the personification of evil. He needed public support for his crusade, and this cartoon by Thomas Nast helped him win it. Comstock arrested Woodhull on November 2, 1872, for distributing her supposedly obscene newspaper.

Former SHGAPE president Walter Nugent passed away in 2021. On April 1, 2023, historians gathered at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, to remember him. William Deverell, Nancy Unger, Donna Gabaccia, Alan Lessoff, Charles Postel, and Annette Atkins spoke about Walter Nugent as a scholar, a colleague, a mentor, and a friend; then the audience joined in with their own memories and stories. The following roundtable is a lightly edited version of the panelists’ comments from that day, including an introduction that William Deverell wrote for the journal. We have included a Walter Nugent Reading List at the end—a selected bibliography of his books and articles, as well as works about him.