Historians are reassessing institutions of culture, power, and democracy in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. Recent contributions to the field explore fomenting social and political cultures that resulted in the making and remaking of power in U.S. society. Wealth disparity, racism, and housing conditions constitute a few key factors that allowed some groups to become increasingly better off, whereas others faced systematic discrimination and exclusion. Historians work to explain the hegemonic dynamics of U.S. society in the face of waves of immigration and the conceptualization of America as a “melting pot” of different groups and cultures.

Concerted exercises of power emerging from different directions attempted to unify the nation at a time of deep labor, racial, and economic unrest. These and other recent books draw upon newly available archives and reinterpret existing materials to reexamine cultural authority, law, and politics.

Taken together, these innovative contributions to the field facilitate thinking about the creation of complex exclusionary systems in the United States. These systems were heavily ensconced in racist sentimentality and mired in the tangled politics of apportionment and other legal constraints, immigration policy, cultural authority, and newly emergent scientific disciplines. These books explore the creation of institutions and practices that determined the success and failure of individuals and groups amid the rapid industrial transformation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

These monographs ask a series of critically important questions concerning this era and its lasting consequences for American society: What are the root causes of the systems of cultural hegemony in an era of growing national consciousness? How could such a grossly segregated and economically unbalanced country coexist with expanding and modernizing markets and a rising standard of living for so many? How were certain individuals (such as literary figures, politicians, social activists, and other celebrities) chosen and constructed into national cultural heroes over others who were subverted in American historical consciousness?

Recent works in the field strive to address these and other questions by considering agency and power in light of historic changes in immigration, law, commerce, and cultural institutions. These monographs also document the impact of complex cultural and social structures and legal traditions of immigrant societies as they responded to the rapid, raw, and emergent modernist forms of U.S. culture and government. Labor groups, political parties, and growing corporate capitalist interests battled over the structures of citizenship in American society. These works offer examples of the development of a national state, but also, judging by the responses of state and federal governments, of perceived problems or threats to mainstream American life. Sites of cultural production, such as universities, are also evaluated.

Andrea Geiger's Subverting Exclusion: Transpacific Encounters with Race, Case, and Borders, 1885–1928, examines immigration and the remaking of U.S. society at the turn of the century. It takes a transnational approach by comparing the immigrant experiences of Japanese Americans coming in droves to Mexico and British Columbia, as well as Washington, Oregon, and California. Geiger writes, “Like all immigrants, Japanese immigrants perceived and responded to the new environments they encountered in North America in terms of the social and cultural understandings they brought with them from their countries of origin. These included, in Japan, historical status and caste categories—mibun in Japanese—written into law to reinforce the status system of the Tokugawa period (1600–1867)” (1). The influence of these caste structures in Japan persisted in various forms within the Japanese American community for decades after these status laws were formally abolished in Japan. Geiger demonstrates how the lingering effect of these status systems shaped responses to racism, economic hardship, and pressures to conform to mainstream American culture. Japanese Americans nevertheless were largely considered racial outcasts and experienced over a half-century of severe discrimination from Anglo Americans. Hardships faced in the United States worked to upend some traditional Japanese cultural norms while reinforcing others. Immigrants of lower caste had more incentive to shed existing biases.

By surveying major turning points in policy during the period, this book adds to the conversation with a richly textured and deep reading of archival sources. Geiger demonstrates that the Japanese immigrant community was anything but unified. Even so, the United States government espoused a rhetoric of hegemony, at once encouraging Japanese Americans to ignore traditional caste structures to build a more equitable society while simultaneously discriminating against immigrants from the Pacific with racist fervor. Japanese civil activists were disheartened by such hypocrisy but lacked the power to stop the creation of new, restrictive immigration policies. Geiger's study highlights the benefits and shortcomings of oral history collections, some of which were blind to questions of caste, status, and race when interviews were recorded during the second half of the twentieth century. This book returns to this theme in the conclusion, which contemplates the limits of oral history in understanding the Japanese response to the realities of life in the United States. While the book, of course, requires chronological limits, left unexplored is how these policies and culturally specific reactions shaped subsequent generations of Japanese Americans. New oral histories, more attentive to these questions, might well borrow from Geiger's description of the limits in the available archives.

Peter Argersinger's Representation and Inequality in Late Nineteenth-Century America explores the development and crystallization of legal practices that, in effect, aggressively facilitated partisan manipulation of electoral rules and redistricting in ways that all but guaranteed particular outcomes embedded in state and local interests, political parties, and power networks. Partisan-run apportionment links nearly all aspects of American political life of the late nineteenth century, argues Argersinger, noting that many historians have underestimated or missed entirely the influence of this widely prevalent practice in shaping political cultures and institutions in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The book cites a remarkable array of nineteenth-century newspapers, as well as court cases that illustrate the judicial precedents that sustained gerrymandering.

The book focuses mainly on gerrymandering and judicial responses to it in the midwestern United States. Through sophisticated examples of patterns established on the state level in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, the work details fierce debates and tense battles over the use of apportionment to disenfranchise political out-groups. It explores the response at different times of Republicans and Democrats, as well as labor interests and other political interests groups of the late nineteenth century.

Argersinger places the evolution of judicial thinking within the context of sociopolitical values and norms, though the practical responses by different groups could have been examined more extensively. He writes, “Far more than the mundane mapping of districts by self-interested legislators, apportionment was an issue, at base, of political legitimacy, where Americans wrestled with beliefs about equity and democracy” (5). Argersinger discovers that citizens and newspaper editors did respond to unchecked instances of gerrymandering; however these protests often failed to stem the tide of redistricting.

In Building Culture: Studies in the Intellectual History of Industrializing America 1867–1910, Richard Teichgraeber applies a pluralist approach to the study of ideas and culture in the industrializing United States. The book responds to the formulations offered by historians Alan Trachtenberg and Lawrence E. Levine by reexamining the relationship between the evolution of American culture, the solidification of class stratification, labor unrest, and the rise of industrial capitalism.Footnote ¹

In this set of revised essays on the formation of cultural institutions and ideas about self-culture at the turn of the century, Teichgraeber rejects the view that American cultural developments became more multifaceted and diverse simply for the benefit of social elites, who through the manipulation of culture sought to remain ensconced at the top. Rather, Teichgraeber illuminates a diverse but deliberate series of efforts by various individuals determined to shape national culture. These people seemingly refused to settle on specific ideas about what proper self-cultivation included, even as they reinforced and shaped culture through new institutions of higher learning.

This book offers a more optimistic reading of American cultural formation during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century than do many other works in recent years. And yet, while Teichgraeber argues against a simple reading of culture as “social control,” the controlling processes that shape society are not wholly explicit or apart from the personal identity formation or self-culture he describes.

Where this book particularly excels is in Teichgraeber's examination of two major figures—Ralph Waldo Emerson and W.E.B. Du Bois. He asks, why did Americans of the industrial era value Emerson's work so highly and why did his influence on American letters become an “accepted fact” as he grew into old age and died in 1882? The first intersection of Emerson's legacy with Du Bois is set at a joint meeting between the American Historical Association and the American Economic Association in New Orleans in 1903, the same year as the publication of Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk and a pointed moment in American history in terms of the number of racially based instances of violence, especially in the South but throughout the entire country. Teichgraeber argues that while historians run the risk of oversimplification in terming one historical moment as a “watershed,” the academic meetings held in New Orleans in 1903—or the “Twin Conventions”—assisted the crystallization of the Jim Crow South and demonstrated that mainstream academic culture of the era was largely uninterested or unwilling to address what Du Bois concluded would be the problem of the twentieth century: “the colour-line.” Ida B. Wells had published her critical expose of lynching, The Red Record, several years earlier, but American society would only gradually and fitfully address this racial violence and the underlying problem of racism.

In retrospect, Teichgraeber argues, a curious blend between individualistic and inclusive concepts of culture—governed by loose institutional boundaries, and spread throughout various levels of education in American society—left a lasting mark on how the United States came to organize and understand itself. Despite Teichgraeber's attention to the multiplicity of forms of cultural growth, largely absent from this book is a detailed explanation of the appearance of women's culture; the book would benefit from a deeper confrontation with the emergent ideas within women's groups before the successful campaign for women's suffrage.

These books represent recent achievements in American historical imagination, but they do not present an altogether happy tale of American history. Instead, they employ new approaches and new archives to piece together a more accurate portrait of the story of the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Factions vied for power, often bitterly. Racism and labor strife at times verged on class warfare, with capitalism and democracy seemingly tearing the nation apart. In the midst of this, however, people went about their daily lives, migrating to new places, attempting to take part in the political process, launching successful and failed business ventures, and working to create new cultural forms. In the midst of a seemingly chaotic era, Americans also came to appreciate certain kinds of poetry, art, and performance—sometimes for almost mystifying reasons—and on many other occasions with clear and overt symbolic meanings. People in this era also demonstrated an appreciation of certain aesthetic forms while a smaller number pointed to and questioned divisions that excluded non-whites from contributing to the active self-definition of the nation.

These books render permeable the very definitions of the “Gilded Age” and “Progressive Era,” while shaking up the tendency to organize history solely around the nation-state. Illuminating the responses and the silences that surround a host of cultural and political problems, this set of recent works introduce nearly as many questions as they answer, leaving room for future historians to advance or debate their respective arguments about this dynamic period.