The Gilded Age and Progressive Era witnessed the largest influx of American architecture students to the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts. The U.S. contingent—120 students admitted in the 1890s, 154 in the 1900s—accounted for 10 to nearly 20 percent of incoming students each year. This illustrated essay uses projects prepared by these students to introduce the major features and principles of the Ecole's architecture curriculum, in particular the physical and instructional framework of the atelier and the medium of the concours. The essay presents a step-by-step selection of projects by American students admitted between 1890 and 1909. These range from a twelve-hour sketch problem required for the admission competition to a diplôme (masters' thesis). Beyond introducing the Beaux-Arts method of instruction, these prints provide insight into the subsequent American career of their authors and thus of American architecture and urban design overall, given the enormous influence exerted by the Ecole des Beaux Arts and its anciens élèves. Drawings requested from Ecole students were not just artfully composed and brilliantly rendered pictures. They were problem-solving endeavors. Former students preserved them not only as study models, but also as status symbols, even trophies.

In 1902, Clemencia López journeyed to the United States to work for the liberation of her imprisoned brothers and for Filipino independence. She granted interviews, circulated her photograph, and spoke in public under the sponsorship of American anti-imperialists and suffragists. López argued that Filipinos like herself were already a civilized people and thus did not need Americans' “benevolent assimilation.” Her gender and her elite family background helped her make this case. Instead of presenting her as racially inferior, published accounts expressed appreciation of her feminine refinement and perceptions of her beauty as exotic. Americans simultaneously perceived her as apolitical because of her sex. López was thus able to take advantage of American gender politics to discuss the “delicate subject” of autonomy for the Philippines in ways that anti-imperialist Filipino men could not.

For thirty years after Franklin Pierce's death, the ex-president's reputation remained low in the estimation of historians and the public. Most saw Pierce and his successor James Buchanan as primary culprits in the sectional discord leading to the Civil War. Between 1900 and 1915, however, Pierce's reputation improved, with the sectional healing represented by Blue-Gray reunions on former battlefields like Gettysburg and the election of only the second Democratic president since the war, Woodrow Wilson. This process of healing was particularly difficult in Pierce's home state of New Hampshire. In a classic case of contested memory, the Grand Army of the Republic repeatedly stymied Democratic attempts to raise a statue to the state's only president and criticized Pierce as a traitor and Confederate sympathizer. The Democrats, however, took over the New Hampshire governor's chair in 1913, and the legislature voted to honor Pierce with a statue. In that small early twentieth-century window, Franklin Pierce became a beneficiary of hard-earned sectional reconciliation.