This issue is the largest in the journal's history, featuring as it does five articles, a SHGAPE Presidential Address, a forum on teaching and studying borders and migration, and a book roundtable. As Kristin Hoganson, current president of the Society for the History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, details, it also marks the first issue in which the journal's next editors, Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa, have come aboard.
The contemporary resonances of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are what drew many of us to study this period. Few parallels are as striking as the debates over migration, borders, and diversity that shook U.S. life then and are now doing so again. In what ways are the politics and policies of the Donald J. Trump administration a return to the nativism behind Chinese exclusion and the administrative regime implanted in the 1924 Immigration Act? How might knowledge of that period and of contemporary migration politics, policies, and communities inform one another? To what extent does the focus of recent scholarship on exclusion and state surveillance prepare us to understand contemporary developments, and to what extent does it obscure more inclusive histories of pluralism and acceptance? What, more generally, are the particular challenges and opportunities of studying and teaching these subjects in this fraught political environment? Six scholars of migration and borders take up these and related questions in this issue's forum. Our book roundtable, on Torrie Hester's Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy (2017), provides another entrée into these issues. Hester and her interlocutors—Rachel Ida Buff, Aviva Chomsky, Grace Peña Delgado, Hidetaka Hirota, and Emily Pope-Obeda—use her book as a platform to discuss the burgeoning study of deportation and related fields, including some of the tensions between a focus on the state and its international context and on migrant communities themselves.
Lloyd Ambrosius, SHGAPE's immediate past president, describes a key moment in the history of the U.S. state and the international system of which it was a part in “World War I and the Paradox of Wilsonianism.” Wilson led the country into the Great War with confidence that the United States set the apex of modern civilization as a capitalist democracy, one whose principles should reorder the world as a whole. But of course Wilson found delivering on such ambition more difficult than bringing the war itself to a successful end. Nevertheless, Wilsonianism far outlived the Wilsonian moment.
African Americans saw other paradoxes, to say nothing of hypocrisies, in the United States’ claim to be a democracy. Yet they too were implicated in the nation's long reach overseas. Brian Shott's exploration of journalist T. Thomas Fortune's 1902 visit to the Philippines and Hawaii shows the ways in which he hoped that African American participation in U.S. colonialism might come to undermine white supremacy. The reaction to his visit and writings by American authorities and the Filipino press suggested just how difficult this task would be.
If a simultaneous commitment to democracy and empire created internal tensions, so too did the pursuit of capitalism and Christian piety. Paul Emory Putz details how the “Marrying Parson” (a pastor who readily married couples he did not know in exchange for a fee) became a controversial figure in the early twentieth century. Putz argues that their persistence, despite the disapproval of the Protestant establishment, reflected the inability of Protestant leaders to police youthful sexual autonomy and the power of the market alike. Although the term “Marrying Parson” has left popular discourse, the practice of formally ordained officiants quickly marrying their paying clients has become so ubiquitous as to obscure its once fraught origins. Protestant leaders found a happier alliance of piety and economic modernity in their use of urban boosterism in Colorado Springs, where, as Greg Atkins explains, the city's leaders insisted that all residential land deeds include strict temperance clauses. This early fusion of Christianity with real estate consumerism evolved from a means to spur urban growth to a more ambitious moral crusade backed by municipal government.
The last two articles use specific institutions to treat broader historical developments. Inspired by dreams of New South boosterism in the 1880s, the founders of Newcomb College Pottery hoped that their endeavor would embody a modern commercial enterprise of the sort they believed the region badly needed. As Meaghan Freeman argues, however, the Pottery's leaders came to embrace the anti-industrial rhetoric that marked the wider Arts and Crafts movement. In so doing, they adopted a sentimental regionalism that invoked an idyllic past more than it conjured a dynamic future. A similar concern for economic modernity—especially worker productivity—marked the management of the Pennsylvania Training School, a pioneering institution for those with what would today be called “intellectual disabilities.” Yet, as Brent Ruswick and Elliott Simon detail in their careful examination of the School's rich internal records, parents and professionals did not always agree on what constituted disability and education for those deemed “feeble minded” by medical experts. The School was marked by the same tensions of work, race, class, and gender, that roiled the American world from occupied Manila, the trenches of Europe, Colorado Springs, New Orleans, and beyond.
