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 argues that reformers’ racial nativism, belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to reproductive and eugenic curriculum used by early public-school sex education programs. It utilizes newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the American Social Hygiene Association, Committee of Fourteen, United Neighborhood Houses, and Child Study Association in New York City to answer several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider as the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society? While the existing scholarship explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform, examining them separately downplays the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups worked across organizational lines to promote sex education.

This article examines the enclosure of the de facto commons that surrounded New Orleans during the final decades of the nineteenth century and argues that public parks were crucial tools deployed by civic elites on behalf of that initiative. As the regulatory efforts of reform-minded mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare failed to eliminate the persistent “cattle nuisance” that emanated from the undeveloped suburbs, he turned to parks as a means of fundamentally transforming the character of the land. By physically enclosing large swathes of acreage, conditioning the public to be urban subjects, and associating the area with leisure rather than agrarian production, the parks made it possible for the city’s modernizers to push dairy farmers out of the area and initiate a process of residential development. By examining this strategic use of greenspace in Gilded Age-era New Orleans, this article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which the urban environment was manipulated in service of the broader New South movement.

This article investigates how Progressive Era writers, both popular and scientific, helped to construct multiracial identities alongside competing efforts to enshrine race into strictly black and white terms. Existing scholarship on race in the Progressive Era has not sufficiently analyzed the presence of multiracial populations. Instead, scholars have treated state and federal efforts to police racial boundaries, namely through anti-miscegenation laws and the census, as evidence that multiracial persons were a legal impossibility. However, scientific and popular writing on Appalachia provides a conceptual space in which multiracialism was not only a conceptual possibility, but was engendered. Appalachia took on increased importance during the Progressive Era as both intellectuals and reformers used the region to frame their anxieties about the limits of modernity and the threat of racial mixing. The region was home to white mountaineers who appeared arrested in time, existing in uncomfortable proximity to newly discovered groups with white, black, and Native American ancestry who also seemed to have been shunned by civilization. In attempting to understand the peculiar conditions of Appalachia, these Progressive Era writers helped to advance some of the first ideas about what it meant to be mixed-race in America.

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.

In January 1918, Congress began public hearings on the American war effort in World War I due to widespread reports of gross inefficiency and incompetence within the War Department. In particular, unhealthy conditions and the outbreak of disease at hastily constructed training camps led to the deaths of thousands of newly drafted soldiers and prompted a public outcry. The criticism was led by Democratic Senator George Chamberlain, and the adversarial response of Secretary of War Newton Baker and President Wilson established a cleavage between the legislative and the executive branches during the last year of World War I that carried over into the postwar period. Furthermore, it highlights tensions within the progressive movement, as the use of expanded federal authority led some progressive Democrats to emphasize loyalty to the Wilson administration, while others continued to emphasize reform and governmental transparency.

In the history of the Gilded Age and its geopolitics, Henry Adams has a reputation for being an imperialist. While not universally subscribed to by historians, this characterization has waxed sufficiently as to eclipse Adams’s more complex, even contradictory, record on the American Empire. The evidence I will marshal will not prove that Adams was actually an anti-imperialist, but it will reveal the protean nature of Adams’s views of the American Empire. To get a grip on this relatively unexamined aspect of Adams’s thought, I will analyze his correspondence during the last decade of the nineteenth century in which he criticized the extension of American power across the Pacific, particularly in regard to its political economy, religion, and civilization. With the onset of the American Filipino War, Adams raged at the news of American atrocities. This paper shows that Adams’s outrage was part of an incipient civilizational ideology, one that neither materialized into an attachment to the anti-imperialist cause nor accepted the vaunted superiority of the West. Even though Adams possessed no principle to guide his thinking on the empire, his pessimistic evaluation of the extension of American power is enough to reconsider his reputation as an imperialist.

In January of 1920, the House of Representatives passed HR 288, also known as the Carter Bill, which would have made all American Indians born in the territorial United States citizens. While lauded by some as a “simple act of justice” to extend citizenship to America’s first peoples, many Native Americans protested the bill, which eventually led to its demise. In the press, the Pueblos led the protest. Their activism highlights key, yet overlooked, developments in American Indian citizenship in the early twentieth century. First, citizenship lost any pretense of a consensual nature. Second, Indigenous protests forced congressmen to change the very nature of citizenship: from a status that marked completed assimilation to something much more pluralistic. Highlighting the Pueblos’ fight helps historians analyze Native activism in the Progressive Era while problematizing citizenship as the ultimate aspirational status.

The end of the Civil War did not eradicate Americans’ concerns regarding the fragility of their republic. For many years after Appomattox, newspapers from across the political spectrum warned that the persistence of sectionalism in the postwar United States threatened to condemn the country to the kind of interminable internal disorder supposedly endemic among the republics of Latin America. This article examines how, from the early 1870s onward, growing numbers of U.S. editors, journalists, and political leaders called on Americans to concentrate on extending their nation’s commercial reach into Mexico. In doing so, they hoped to topple divisive domestic issues—notably Reconstruction—from the top of the national political agenda. These leaders in U.S. public discourse also anticipated that collaboration in a project to extend the United States’ continental power would revive affective bonds of nationality between the people of the North and South. In making this analysis, this article argues that much of the early impetus behind U.S. commercial penetration south of the Rio Grande after the Civil War was fueled by Americans’ deep anxieties regarding the integrity of their so-called exceptional republic.

In November 1915, popular Baltimore minister and anti-vice reformer Kenneth G. Murray became enmeshed in scandal after he allegedly attempted to engage in sex with another man at the Y.M.C.A. The revelation of Murray’s alleged queerness became a flashpoint in ongoing contestations over anti-vice reform and the legitimacy of using state power to enforce Christian morality. In the hands of his political opponents, most notably H.L. Mencken, Murray’s apparent homosexuality became a tool for vindicating long-standing assertions that men who campaigned for state-enforced morality were hypocritical and motivated in their activism by sexual and gendered pathologies. In tracing print reactions to Murray’s public exposure, this essay argues that homosexuality proved to be a powerful political weapon against progressive anti-vice campaigning like Murray’s because it was capable of reconciling competing stereotypes of religiously motivated anti-vice reformers as simultaneously overly sexual and impotent, feminized and pathologically masculine. The Murray scandal also opened the door for critiques of muscular Christianity, which made it an early example of how the sexual diagnosis of religious figures and reformers could be used to discredit social and religious activism.

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.