In sixth grade, I was in a musical about the 1890s called How the West Was Really Won. The play's (problematic) songs still pop into my head as I work on the period.

Many years later, I am certain that these lyrics continue to insidiously affect my understanding of the Progressive Era. Certainly, most historians are not naïve about the inevitability of cultural influence: revealing the broad range of hidden influences on our subjects is a large part of many of our analyses. Yet we often allow ourselves to enjoy the illusion of disciplinary autonomy. We imagine that our arguments are simply building on or responding to the evidence and arguments of other historians. We therefore fail to interrogate the great extent to which our individual writings and disciplinary premises build on and respond to the popular histories of our youth (or those that we currently share with our students and the general public).

With this forum, our journal begins to explore the question of the popular representations of the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The Great Gatsby may seem to be an unlikely place for us to start this process. Written in 1925 and set in 1922, it is, at best, at the very end of the period traditionally covered by our journal. Yet just as scholars have recently been strenuously rethinking when the Gilded Age and Progressive Era begins, we should also recognize what a struggle it is to figure out the proper way to close off the era. Very often, scholars approach the period as the mess that Americans needed to clean up after the Civil War—immediately followed by the frenzied building up of a political, economic, and intellectual framework in preparation for the modern era. After its hard work building the state, an empire, and pragmatist philosophies, the Progressive Era then trudges inexorably toward the bright lights of The Twenties.

In turn, popular, as well as scholarly, perceptions of the 1920s are still in large part defined by the Great Gatsby. The three pieces that follow focus on Baz Lurhmann's glitzy 2013 cinematic adaptation of Gatsby but explore more broadly the cultural work that Gatsby has done, both in Fitzgerald's original version and in later film adaptations. Literature and film critic David Shumway considers what Baz Luhrmann has done with the “vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum,” that Gatsby has become in the popular mind. Luhrmann's film moves away from the novel's economic critique by disrupting and destabilizing its realist core, making his film “fantastic and dreamlike” and placing the book's only sober voice in an insane asylum. Yet Luhrmann also makes explicit viewers' desire to draw an easy analogy between The Twenties and the present by bringing in Jay Z's hip hop music. While it may not make for a successful adaptation, it interrupts viewers' ability to un-self-consciously analogize our period to Gatsby's, calling out the analogy and forcing us to think through its implications. High school English teacher Seth MacLowry then focuses on the process of cultural transmission: how he, as a classroom teacher, introduces Gatsby, in all its cultural forms, to students. He encourages some of his more advanced students to look under the hood of the production of cultural tropes; the rest approach the novel as a creative representation of social realities. The students find in the novel and the film genuine power and immediacy. They experience it, still today, as relevant and modern. Historian Bob Batchelor, finally, explores what it is that is being conveyed when Gatsby is evoked in popular culture. He suggests that Gatsby works as a powerful “myth” or “folklore.” It remains available to one generation after the next because, in the minds of many, it has become a mere collection of symbols or memes that Batchelor calls “the meta-Gatsby”: “a generic group of synonyms, such as “wealthy,” “lavish,” or “rags-to-riches,” “the American dream.” Most of all, the work of this meta-novel is to reassure us that, despite our doubts, the modern disrupts rather than consolidates class positions.

Films, of course, express the values of the eras in which they are produced. But they also frequently articulate intriguing and influential narratives of the past. In grappling with Gatsby, we don't just reflect on a boisterous, gaudy movie (and the classic novel that inspired it): we literally and figuratively try to see what it all means.