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.

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.

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.