This chapter tracks the impact of George and the Land War on some of the central ideological currents of the period, revealing how the transatlantic Land War came to occupy its fractious place in liberal political thinking. It suggests the importance of George’s radical campaigns and the Irish land agitation in accelerating acceptance of the more technocratic sightlines of new liberalism and economic marginalism. Pressed by the destabilising threat of demands for access to land grounded in natural rights, liberal political thinkers discarded the last vestiges of the tradition’s democratic-republican heritage in favour of a statist and ostensibly ‘value-free’ perspective enunciated in a language of scientific authority. Henry George’s social and intellectual networks are examined, as well as the work of liberal political theorists dealing with the land question, George, and the Irish crisis. The chapter argues that the contradictions between liberty and property – between natural freedoms and private accumulation – that the Land War exposed forced liberalism to finally and more fully dispose of its older individualistic assumptions in order to protect social order, property, ‘progress’, and ‘civilization’.

Black Americans sing of their hope in the promise of Reconstruction, which is eventually betrayed as the white North and South sing their way into the “romance of reunion.” The Indigenous peoples to the west face a US government hostile to their songs and dances, Mexican vaqueros are immortalized in corridos, Chinese and Irish railroad workers are pitted against each other in minstrel songs, and the Fisk Jubilee Singers introduce the spiritual to the world (even as the Ku Klux Klan churns out its earliest sheet music). Woman suffragists and former abolitionists join hands in song; and as the country descends into the corrupt mire of a Gilded Age, Grange farmers take on the monopolies of railroad magnates and “robber barons” in songs that ring into the present century. In the Pennsylvania coal fields, the executed Molly Maguires are memorialized in powerful balladry, and the Knights of Labor provide the musical soundtrack to the greatest fight between labor and capital that the country has yet seen.

This chapter analyses the move of historians away from text and towards the interpretation of visuals. Starting with art history’s turn to the social and the cultural, it traces the interest of historians for an ever wider group of images, including popular images. It also highlights the emergence of perspectivalism and transdisciplinarity in the field of visual history. The main bulk of the chapter is taken up with presenting a range of examples showing how the visual turn in historical writing has contributed to deconstructing national identites, class identities and racial/ethnic identities. Ranging widely across different parts of the globe it also discusses the deconstruction of religious and gender identities through visual histories that have in total contributed much towards a much higher self-reflexivity among historians when it comes to the construction of collective identities through historical writing.

The women’s suffrage campaign was part of a long movement that began with women’s participation in abolitionism, and temperance, and merged with the labor movement and progressivism. Though its most visible success was the passage of the 19th amendment, this build upon state and local campaigns, especially in the west, where the weakness of the party system gave womens’ groups a footing. But it was only with women’s support for World War One that mass support for the suffrage was one, followed by a shift of women’s activism into the party system and into policy activity.