This issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era focuses our attention on the ways that late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century institutions—in this case, settlement houses, prisons, and schools—shaped American life in significant yet not necessarily beneficial ways. Urban reformers, criminologists, and educators crafted places and spaces that might mold the minds and lives of Americans, especially immigrants, inmates, and schoolchildren. Yet they aimed to silence dissent and promote conformity, rather than fostering the ideals of liberty and individuality that have so often marked our nation’s finest moments.

We begin with the 2024 Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE) Graduate Student Essay Prize, by Yonghyeon Kim: “Disinterested Observers, Wholesome Workers, and Democratic Citizens: Masculinized Urban Reform Ideas of Robert A. Woods and South End House.” Kim turns a familiar story on its proverbial head. While Progressive Era historians have, in recent decades, analyzed to great effect the gendered thought of female social settlement workers, we have not as thoroughly analyzed the gendered ideas of male settlement house workers. As we learn in Kim’s piece, Robert A. Woods of Boston’s South End House saw the social settlement as a place that might discipline neighborhood residents, turning men into productive workers and citizens. His thought was based more in eugenics than in the cultural pluralism that marked the writings of, say, Jane Addams. Woods sought to impose a distinctive type of discipline on his neighbors, especially by ensuring that men served as breadwinners for their families while avoiding labor radicalism or commercial amusements. And, as we see in Kim’s analysis, Woods’s neighborhood was expansive. After 1919, he worked to transplant his ideas about social settlements and manliness to Asian nations, including China.

In the first of this issue’s other two articles, Bonnie Ernst’s “‘A Tilt Between Justice and Total Depravity’: The Criminalization of Black Women and the Growth of Carceral Space in Detroit,” we see how courts and the press offered punitive measures that were harsher for Black women than they were for white women. As northern industrial cities like Detroit grew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they saw massive migration from the South, as well as from Europe. When African American women made choices that did not line up with white society’s expectations, they were incarcerated in prisons and pilloried in newspapers. This article anticipates a special issue on race and criminal justice that will likely be published in 2027; stay tuned for more on this important topic. In the next article of the present issue, Emmanuel Destenay engages the subject of education in politically polarizing times. “Silencing Dissent and Eradicating Disloyalty in the Classroom: Identity, Patriotism, and Moral Restraint in Wartime America, 1917–1918” takes us back to the World War I era, when some school boards and professional academic associations silenced teachers in the name of patriotism. While many educators and administrators recognized the rights to free speech and academic freedom during peacetime, during wartime they perceived a moral duty to get in line behind nationalistic sentiment. Today, in an era when many Americans find themselves under fire for statements that express even a shadow of political heterodoxy, one can hardly imagine a more timely study than this one. Clearly, we need to think deeply about the role of education in a democratic society. Finally, the eight book reviews that close out this issue deal with an array of significant historical topics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: medicine, sport, empire, Black religion, labor radicalism, affordable housing, museums, children, and race.

I close this editor’s note with momentous news: After sixteen years with Cambridge University Press, The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era will be moving to a new publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, in 2027. I believe it is fair to say that all of us at SHGAPE appreciate immensely our decade-and-a-half partnership with Cambridge, which has helped the journal grow into one of the top scholarly venues in the field of United States history. My own relationship with the journal has been a long and fruitful one. One of my earliest published articles (and my first to be accepted by an academic journal) appeared in the inaugural issue with Cambridge, in January 2011. That piece benefited immensely from the insights and guidance of then-editor Alan Lessoff, as well as the anonymous peer reviewers. (Thank you, Alan, for taking a gamble on a young and somewhat inexperienced scholar with a perhaps unorthodox piece about sport and higher education!) I am sure that other scholars can say something similar about the profound impact of this journal on their writing and their intellectual trajectories. A host of talented, dedicated, and hardworking scholars have contributed to the growth of this journal over the past quarter of a century, since its launch in 2002. As we transition to a new publisher and a new era, the staff of the journal and of the society will work to maintain JGAPE as one of the most substantial scholarly outlets in American history—a place where students, senior scholars, and everyone in between can turn for stimulating and thought-provoking work on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American history.