As editor of the Washington Bee, a Black owned newspaper based in Washington, D.C., during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, William Calvin Chase waged a vigorous campaign against Prohibition. Among the targets of his crusade were ministers, politicians, civic leaders, and other anti-liquor reformers concerned about the effects of alcohol consumption on society. This article explores Chase’s anti-prohibitionist rhetoric in the Washington Bee. It contends that, in the process of his anti-prohibitionist crusade, Chase flagged racism, racial violence, and Jim Crow as problems far more injurious to the Black community than the consumption and sale of alcohol. In so doing, it situates Chase and his rhetoric within the larger tradition of Black intellectual resistance as he leveraged the Bee to counter arguments in support of anti-alcohol reforms that swept the nation during the Progressive Era.

This article examines Robert A. Woods, headworker of Boston’s South End House, focusing on his ideas of progressive urban reform and the role of manliness in shaping them. Woods advanced masculinized visions of settlement reform in two ways. First, he stressed the disinterestedness and objectivity of reformers, virtues he regarded as essential to manly citizenship and as grounds for legitimizing male authority in disciplinary initiatives directed at workers who failed to meet moral and economic standards. Second, he upheld Victorian middle-class manhood as the model for the working class. For Woods and his colleagues, working-class men who held stable, skilled jobs and fulfilled their roles as breadwinners formed the basis of orderly neighborhoods to sustain democracy and social stability. These gendered assumptions led Woods to adopt a more top-down, authoritative approach to reform than his female counterparts. Building on Woods’s view of urban society, this article argues that masculinity, no less than femininity, functioned as a factor that directed the settlement house movement during the Progressive Era, allowing male reformers to assert their distinctive interests and demonstrate the efficacy of masculine ideals in social reform.

This essay, based on the 2025 SHGAPE Presidential Address, considers the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of “baby murderers.” It examines the dilemmas that newspaper reporters, local authorities, medical experts, and ordinary citizens confronted as they wrestled with the problem of young children who killed. How could one distinguish an accident from an intentional act? At what ages did children understand the consequences of their actions? When were they old enough to grasp the finality of death? Could murderous tendencies be nipped in the bud? Were homicidal impulses inherited, the result of deficient parenting, or the fault of a corrupt environment? Were baby murderers mentally ill, morally deficient, or just plain evil? Did the law sufficiently deter perpetrators and protect potential victims? These questions acquired special resonance in the late nineteenth century, a time that preceded the establishment of separate juvenile justice systems but one in which the right to a protected childhood had gained increasing (but by no means universal) acceptance. The Gilded Age, then, offers a particularly rich vantage point from which to view how various popular definitions of childhood intersected and clashed with medical understandings and legal procedures.

The early reservation years of the late nineteenth century comprise a period of intellectual mobility and activism for Native Americans. This article argues that the thousands of letters written by western Native Americans to non-Natives during this period were a consequential weapon against U.S. colonialism. By highlighting the history of Wolf Chief, a determined Hidatsa activist, this article reveals the many strategies of Native Americans who wrote to U.S. presidents, officials, newspapers, and others to decolonize their lives, seek justice, counteract colonial abuses, and preserve a sense of self-determination. U.S. policy makers hoped that a more literate Native population would be transformed, that educated Indians might understand the virtues of Americanization, and that literacy might quell opposition to U.S authority. Instead, Native Americans used the written word in the early reservation years to challenge a massive colonial apparatus in ways that scholars have not recognized. Wolf Chief’s advocacy from the Fort Berthold Reservation was rooted in the conviction that the Three Tribes deserved a meaningful role in shaping their own futures and protecting their autonomy. His wide-ranging correspondence emphasized the importance of including Native perspectives in the management of reservation affairs, as he believed that effective solutions required the active involvement of his people.

Between 1860 and 1930, the Canada-United States border emerged as a crucial economic boundary. In creating the border, however, Canada and the United States prioritized revenue generation over coherence or uniformity. This priority created an unpredictable barrier for both businesses and individuals. Consuls often focused their attention on understanding the impacts of tariffs, trade volume, and smuggling on transnational commerce. The border’s practical impacts, however, went far deeper. For individuals, the border’s unpredictability shaped everything from how they gave gifts to the ways they supported their families. For businesses, the border impacted profit margins and intellectual property. But it also changed how businesses approached administrative tasks—everything from staff training to who they delegated to fill out paperwork. Although imagined as a federal project, the border’s tolerances for variation ensured that regional and local solutions proliferated. Federal mandates merged with local interests to create an inconsistent barrier of ever-changing heights.

This article examines the unexpected defeat of the Child Labor Amendment (CLA) by focusing on gender’s central role in the arguments of both its proponents and opponents. In foregrounding the plight of teenage girls toiling in factories, those supporting the CLA capitalized on widespread concerns with protecting future mothers. Meanwhile, opponents focused on the allegedly disempowered teenage boy, who would supposedly lose his right to work and become a “self-made man.” Arguments about gender regularly intersected with those around childhood, age, and race. This article augments the existing literature on the CLA’s downfall, which largely points to the post-World War I Red Scare as a primary culprit. By analyzing the rhetoric of both sides through the lens of gender, it becomes evident that even arguments about governmental overreach were often framed through gendered images, myths, and stories. Moreover, by analyzing state-level child labor laws rather than focusing only on the more prominent federal ones, we gain additional insight into how labor regulations in this era aimed to delineate distinct roles for boys and girls in the workplace—and outside of it.

This article explores the Chicago School Board’s 1915 union-busting effort against the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, a union of women teachers co-founded by two Catholics. This article argues that newspaper coverage reveals that the gender identities and religious affiliations of the CTF members made them doubly intolerable. Not only did their very presence in public schools threaten to introduce Catholicism into a space that Protestants viewed as their domain, but these women also had the temerity to expect just compensation for their work. The Catholicism of the CTF’s leaders attracted nativist prejudice, and the press’s fixation on religious difference reframed the Loeb Affair from a conflict over salaries, pensions, and union membership into an endeavor to wrest the schools from Catholic control. Whatever the initial motivation of the Loeb Rule, anti-Catholicism became a weapon to defeat the economic and equality claims of women who demanded to be treated as professionals rather than as proxy mothers. From this viewpoint, the Loeb Affair figures not only as a loss for organized labor and teacher organizing, but it also illustrates Progressive Era beliefs about competing ways of performing womanhood, the role of religion in public schools, and the fear of Catholic power.

This article examines the ways Black women and girls in Detroit, Michigan, were criminalized and punished as they encountered criminal courts, indeterminate sentences, women’s reformatories, and police brutality from the 1870s to the early 1900s. Detroit was uniquely situated as a border city and a major destination in the Great Migration in the early twentieth century. Black women and girls fled vigilante violence, poverty, and segregation. Women sought new opportunities in the urban North. This article argues that criminal justice institutions laid the foundation for the criminalization of Black women and girls by the early twentieth century. Drawing on archival records, annual prison reports, and historical newspapers, the article traces the ways Black women were categorized and punished in criminal courts, women’s prisons, and encounters with police. The article brings together histories of the reformatory movement, urbanization, industrialization, and segregation to examine how the treatment of Black women and girls in Detroit put in place practices that expanded the carceral reach of the state and excluded people from freedom and opportunity along racialized and gendered boundaries.

Once Congress declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917, local, state, and federal authorities moved quickly to suppress dissent among public school teachers. Across the United States, school boards and superintendents dismissed teachers deemed disloyal and warned others about the consequences of certain forms of speech and conduct. Colleges and universities likewise dismissed faculty members for dissent, prompting widespread debate within academic circles over the limits of free speech during wartime. This article argues that coercion alone cannot explain why teachers and academics came to accept the view that obstructing the war effort was morally unacceptable. During the war, prevailing debates over education and democracy shifted in both meaning and purpose. These arguments appealed directly to the moral commitments of teachers and scholars. Many came to see criticism of the government in the classroom as an indirect reproach to students—and parents—who supported the war. Such criticism could also appear to dishonor the soldiers who had died on the Western Front. Teachers’ associations and the American Association of University Professors ultimately aligned with the government, arguing that teachers and faculty members could not assume their First Amendment rights would be fully protected during periods of national crisis.

Both historians of science and Americanists have depicted famed nineteenth-century astronomer and political economist Simon Newcomb as a relatively stern “mugwump,” impressive in his scientific achievement, yet at times stunted by a parochial arrogance. In histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, in particular, Newcomb makes cameos as a stand-in for an economically conservative wing. This article analyzes two facets of Newcomb’s postwar thinking that have been consistently left out: race and nationalism. After the Civil War, Newcomb pushed a nationalist discourse of American scientific progress in The North American Review that at times wavered between cultural and biological determinism. He spoke in terms of national styles and believed that American science, opposed to French, German, or English science, languished. His advocacy for an American science rested upon implicit “ethnoracial” nationalist assumptions. Contrary to his laissez-faire liberalism, it called for a more activist scientific state, and feared a nationalism of apathy that he believed pervaded both American science and politics. This article, moreover, argues that Newcomb’s thought was intimately tied to his experiences in postbellum Washington, suggesting the need for more localist and urban studies of the rise of state science after the Civil War.

Very few African American soldiers in the First World War ever saw combat or accrued the cultural status conferred by participation in combat, because they were placed primarily into labor units. Sexualized assessments of motivation susceptibility played a crucial, but heretofore unappreciated role, in this placement. As this article demonstrates, sexual racism was central to these assessments and to Black soldiers’ placement because motivation susceptibility was measured, by the War Department, in terms of so-called “morale,” which referred simultaneously to a soldier’s mood and willingness to fight. Military leaders believed that morale was improved or imperiled by a soldier’s sexual conduct. If a soldier was sexually restrained, he could be motivated to fight by chivalrously redirecting his sexual energy into battle. Conversely, if a soldier was sexually unrestrained, he could not be motivated through “parasexual” measures. Connecting the dots between the morale programs of the First World War and the racial exclusion of personnel placement, this article demonstrates that sexualized motivation is central to the story of race and racism in this pivotal conflict.

This article examines the career of activist Frances Kellor (1873–1952), as an important figure among a small group of female pioneers who, prior to 1920, chose to forgo the segregated women’s political cultures of settlement houses, reform organizations, and the suffrage movement, to compete head-on with men in government and party politics. It describes the mixed success of Kellor’s early career efforts to acquire political power, then examines in detail her most visible institutional appointment as Chief of the Progressive Service, in Theodore Roosevelt’s breakaway Progressive Party (1913–1914). The article argues that earlier accounts of the Service have depicted Kellor as an unempathetic taskmaster and negative force, ignoring some primary source evidence that she operated in the face of a hostile campaign by male subordinates to unseat her. It suggests there are grounds to reappraise her performance in this groundbreaking role. It discusses Kellor’s own, later reflections on the masculine realm of public affairs, and how early pioneers in the long, slow process to integrate men and women in political and government institutions were (inevitably) unable to replicate the legislative successes of Progressive Era female pressure group politics.

This article examines Civil War commemoration in St. Louis, Missouri, to demonstrate not only that Memorial Day celebrations followed an atypical path in this border-state city, but that shifts in how Memorial Day was celebrated strongly affected which groups were able to participate. Public Civil War commemoration in St. Louis became increasingly reconciliationist in the early 1870s as the public rejected continued Reconstruction, with the result that Memorial Day became a joint Union and Confederate commemoration. Women and Black men were increasingly excluded, leaving white men, both native-born and German American, to control the narrative of the day. In the 1880s, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), gained enough power in the city to seize control of Memorial Day and change it into a commemoration that honored the Union cause only. This shift also created space for Black veterans and women of both races to participate through their membership in the GAR and its auxiliary, the Woman’s Relief Corps.

Lawrence Goodwyn’s Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America (1976), a pathbreaking book on the history of Populism and agrarianism, turns fifty in 2026. In this retrospective roundtable, a distinguished panel of historians of Populism discusses the book and its legacy, as well as its author and the relevant historiographical debates. Democratic Promise, which focused largely (although not exclusively) on Texas, was one of several works that pushed back against earlier analyses of the Populists, such as the largely negative portrayal in Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform (1955). Goodwyn, who taught for more than three decades at Duke University, controversially introduced the idea of a “shadow movement” that effectively derailed the promise of Populism. Nevertheless, Goodwyn’s book was tremendously influential, and it still demands the attention of historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Contributions to this forum underscore the fact that mass migration during the Progressive Era coincided with the emergence of mass consumption. Progressive Era immigration studies are at the core of the emergent knowledge economy of the age of abundance, centered on an American standard of living that was associated with high wages, affordable goods, more leisure time, and opportunities for material and cultural self-realization. The taxonomies created during the transition to consumer capitalism frequently pathologized immigrants. In their classifications, many Progressive Era protagonists associated immigrants with a low standard of living that manifested itself in unhygienic lifestyles, unhealthy nutrition, and inappropriate consumption. In this reading, categories such as race and ethnicity are part of the construction of the figure of the consumer and the politics of consumption; they reflect modern consumerist subjectivities and structures.