Emily Greene Balch is probably best known as the second American women to win the Nobel Peace Prize—a tireless pacifist and feminist who served as the first secretary of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in the early 1920s. But she was, before that, an innovative social scientist whose scholarly contributions were only later overshadowed by her activism and by formalist tendencies in sociology, which subsequently ignored her critical work on immigration. Balch started her career espousing the “objectivity” of science, but her experience as a researcher of immigration and as a pacifist in search of an understanding of the social psychology of war moved her closer toward a methodological hermeneutic that made formalist sociological principles anathema. Where she blended theory-development with social practice, her male colleagues attempted to conceal political purpose behind disinterested discipline. After 1918, women sociologists were transferred into other fields, namely, back into social work. In Balch's case, she turned to international organizations and the gritty practice of reconciliation, but her profile as a social scientist disappeared altogether. The fate of her intellectual work provides a glimpse of the affinities between gender and certain forms of disciplinary knowledge in the early social sciences.

The extent and intensity of electoral and voter fraud that took place during the U.S. Gilded Age is properly infamous. This paper explores a form of voter intimidation that has garnered comparatively little scholarly attention: economic coercion. Absent secrecy at the polls and security at work, bosses forced workingmen to choose between their job or their vote. Economic voter intimidation provoked both a real and rhetorical crisis in the 1870s and 1880s. In real terms, it disrupted hundreds of elections and damaged thousands of workers’ livelihoods. It became a nationwide crisis after 1873, however, because for the first time, employers were coercing white workingmen on a widespread basis. Reports of employers coercing their employees at the polls throughout the nation confirmed the worst fears of many labor leaders and politicians: white wage-workers were insecure possessors of the franchise whose precariousness might threaten democracy itself. Mining previously overlooked accounts of economic voter intimidation in contested congressional election case records, congressional investigations, corporate records, and newspapers, this article argues that employers’ politicized layoff threats and observation of workers at the polls undermined the political equality of even those men whose whiteness had seemingly secured their privilege.

In 1911, geographer Ellen Churchill Semple and novelist Fannie Caldwell Macaulay departed on an eighteen-month tour around the world. Semple was planning to do fieldwork in Japan, where Macaulay had lived from 1902 to 1907. This paper examines the texts that Semple and Macaulay produced as a result of their experiences in Japan: two articles published in geographical journals by Semple and Macaulay's novels The Lady of the Decoration and The Lady and Sada San. Travel and travel writing were one of the key ways in which white women manifested their cultural authority. Although their texts had very different purposes and audiences, Semple and Macaulay both drew upon and contributed to Orientalist discourses. In both cases, the women's authority ultimately derived from their positions as representatives of white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant American culture, and their work helped reinforce U.S. power and the legitimacy of imperialism. By producing texts that criticized those aspects of non-Western societies that diverged from Western norms and praising those areas in which they conformed, they affirmed the superiority of Western, and specifically American, culture.

La Follette's Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences is a remarkable primary document of the Progressive Era. Originally published in 1913, it remains in print today and has the dubious honor of being one of Richard Nixon's three favorite books. It illuminates the crucial role that La Follette's home state of Wisconsin played in molding La Follette as a man and as a politician, thereby influencing his national progressive agenda; but it also reveals much more.

In 1892, H. Seb Doyle, an African American preacher, learned that Democrats sought to lynch him due to his support of Populist Congressman Tom Watson. Was the threat real? This question became the center of a campaign discussion of race, politics, and corruption. Democratic and Populist newspapers’ accounts of this issue reveal the role of the “rhetoric of corruption” in the Georgia Populist Party's campaigns in the 1890s. Ironically, Populists used the same rhetoric Democrats had used against Republicans during Reconstruction. Populists linked Democratic political and economic malfeasance with the racial “corruptions” of miscegenation and “Negro Domination.” Although the Populists attempted to make this link, their insistence on black and white political equality undermined their white supremacist rhetoric, thereby weakening their case. Despite the Populists’ failure, the ultimate result was the same: the Populists came to abandon biracial politics and called for greater disfranchisement, all in the name of reform.

When Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, visited America in 1876, he planned to assess industrial and technological innovation on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and to pay visits to men whom he admired. Most Americans were fascinated by the emperor, even though his visit came at an awkward time. During the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America was hosting an emperor—and from the last major slaveholding country. This article reviews newspaper accounts of the visit and analyzes the ambivalence displayed toward his visit. Americans were supposedly devoted to equality. Nonetheless, wherever he went during his three-month sojourn, the emperor was met by admiring crowds. One newspaper explained: “It is not the monarch so much as the novelty that attracts in this country.” This article views the visit not from Dom Pedro's impressions of America, but from American responses to the visit of a hereditary monarch—the first to travel around America during his reign. The paper concludes that centennial-year fascination with royalty generally overcame historic contempt for hereditary privilege and lack of interest in royal visitors. Such ambivalent attitudes toward visiting royalty continue into the present day.

Conflicts over citizenship and military service became a central issue in Italian-American relations in the early twentieth century. The United States and Italy founded their concepts of citizenship on two different bases, jus soli and jus sanguinis. As a consequence of this difference and the swelling number of Italian immigrants naturalized in America, the two governments' policies about naturalization and military service collided until 1918. The Italian government's policy put Italian Americans' loyalty to the United States in jeopardy, especially for men who wished to return to Italy for business or educational purposes. Thus, the study of Italian Americans' experiences in the context of the policies of both countries illustrates a key aspect of the relationship between the United States and Italy, both in terms of social experience and public policy.

Democracy and Education appeared amid intense debate over the relationship between school and work. This debate revealed a stark contrast between Dewey's idea to educate young people to understand the complex relationships of modern industry and the ideas of educators who equated vocational education with training fourteen- to sixteen-year-olds for maximal productivity, a view written into the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Whereas Dewey favored integrating vocational education with “a new kind of general education,” his antagonists assailed advocates of the “general” or “academic” curriculum as reactionaries who infected public education with impractical theories that only served those with time and money to indulge their interest in cultural values detached from daily life. Significantly, Dewey did not respond with a defense of theory over practice but with an assertion that his opponents’ thought was permeated by theories, ironically drawn from some of the same sources that influenced mainstream advocates of the “new” education. Understanding how combatants could derive conflicting conclusions from the same sources illuminates the paradoxes and aids in explaining the timing and scope of the Progressive movement.

The intellectual and cultural critic Randolph Bourne originated the concept of a “transnational America” in 1916. More than a mere label, “trans-national America” was the articulation of Bourne's visionary new form of pluralism. This article aims to rethink Bourne's transnationalism as a form of isolationist antiwar idealism, thus helping to bridge his writings on domestic reform and foreign policy. Further, it illuminates an important moment in the intellectual history of isolationism as it assumed a positive, pluralist cast. This analysis also opens new vistas onto the development of a wide-ranging liberal opposition to American entry into World War I. Bourne's potent pluralistic, cosmopolitan ideas and the actions he took—along with those of other antiwar activists, politicians, and thinkers—helped to set the ideological parameters for antiwar thought in the period from 1916 to 1918 as well as for later American dissent, particularly in wartime.

From 1862 to 1923, congressional seed distribution was among the most important functions of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). One of the largest agricultural programs in the late nineteenth century, the practice itself stayed in place until 1923. The subject of little historical research, the seed distribution project is usually viewed as a failure of the scientific agricultural establishment, or as vote mongering by Congress, and its demise as the simple culmination of Progressive Era reform. However, this episode in American history reveals much more than debates over science and agriculture by highlighting the many cultural, economic, scientific, and political questions about the proper role of government in a democracy. By examining heated contemporary political exchanges and published critiques, this article assesses what different constituencies viewed as good in government as they argued for or against free seed distribution, even as the USDA used seed as a vehicle for consolidating the place of science and knowledge in agriculture and in government.

This essay analyzes white settler formations in the Southern Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century. Occupied by the United States in the wake of the Spanish-American War, the Muslim-majority regions of Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago became sites of colonial experimentation and reconfiguration. This led to a brief-but-concerted push by Euro-American fortune seekers to settle the “Muslim South.” Supported by U.S. policy makers and colonial officials, white colonists were drawn to Mindanao-Sulu by visions of permanent settlement and limitless economic opportunity. This analysis contends that settler attempts to build a “white man's country” in the Southern Philippines were shaped by vernaculars and modes of conquest developed on the continental frontier. It interrogates the creation of transoceanic frontier spaces in Mindanao-Sulu and the practical attempts to exploit them, which drew inspiration from diverse sources in the American West and across the colonized globe. In its study of settler fortunes and failures, the essay blurs distinctions between national and imperial peripheries, and contributes to a growing scholarly interest in reassessing the importance of U.S. extraterritorial possessions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

“The Tenor of Belonging” examines the origins of the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a chorus of college students from Fisk University, amidst the official promises of the Reconstruction era, as well as their reception during their first national tour in 1871 and 1872. The article explores the bifurcated meanings behind the spiritual as the singers performed it in this new context. Publicly, it became, for well-to-do white Northern audiences, an image of a quintessential American identity rooted in the soil, “primitive Christianity,” and the trope of redemption through suffering that seemed increasingly threatened in modern, incorporated America. And yet, spirituals had embodied ideals of self-making, piety, communal solidarity, and liberation for their singers since the late eighteenth century; and performing them, as the Jubilee Singers did, likewise became a vehicle for achieving financial security after the Civil War, as the chorus marketed its past in an effort to secure its future. The singers, like their slave forebears, used the spiritual to achieve a level of autonomy, cohesion, and pride as they negotiated the contours of citizenship in a reconfigured nation. As such, their work both prefigures Booker T. Washington's “bootstraps” ethos and W.E.B. Du Bois's “double-consciousness.”

In May of 1896, Richard Bartholdt, a Republican from Missouri and a German immigrant, stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and introduced a bill that would set off months of debate in the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The bill was H.R. 7864, which required all male immigrants between the ages of sixteen and sixty to prove they were literate in either English or some other language. While congressmen on all sides of the issue made passionate arguments for and against this bill, they nevertheless found some areas of agreement. The supporters and opponents of restriction all regarded southern and eastern European immigrants as racially different than those of northwestern European descent. Further, all congressmen understood the purpose of the bill to be as much about improving the United States citizenry racially as intellectually. Richard Bartholdt clearly stated the racial reasoning behind the literacy test when he introduced the bill to the House.

Just after midnight on 17 January 1900, a special train pulled out of Chicago carrying a contingent of public officials on a secret mission to Lockport, about 30 miles to the southwest along the Des Plaines and Illinois River Valleys. They were racing to beat an injunction that was expected to be issued later that day by the United States Supreme Court. The managers of the Sanitary District of Chicago (SDC) were headed for a dam that controlled the water level in a brand new, 30-mile ship canal and drainage channel. Touted as the world's largest earth-moving project, the $33, 000, 000 waterway promised not only to solve the city's sanitation problems but also to boost its economy as the centerpiece of a grand, deep-water highway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Reaching their destination before noon, they ordered the dam's “bear trap” doors lowered, sending a rush of water down the Illinois River. The opening of the canal was so hurried that unfinished construction projects five miles downstream at Joliet were swept away in the ensuing flood, creating a sudden danger of inundating the city.

This article argues that reformers’ racial nativism, belief in the power of eugenics to improve society, and desire to restrict US citizenship to certain racial groups contributed to reproductive and eugenic curriculum used by early public-school sex education programs. It utilizes newspaper accounts and archival records from the headquarters of the American Social Hygiene Association, Committee of Fourteen, United Neighborhood Houses, and Child Study Association in New York City to answer several crucial questions: What dangers did each organization attribute to adolescent sexuality and reproduction? How did each envision its role in societal improvement and in the sex education movement? What did these reform organizations consider as the ideal relationship between the home, school, and society? While the existing scholarship explains how each of these organizations fit into the larger historical context of progressive reform, examining them separately downplays the degree to which ideas about race, reproduction, immigration, and US citizenship circulated among reformers, especially as leaders of these groups worked across organizational lines to promote sex education.

My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to women's history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the PTA, women's literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Women's National Republican Club.

The idea of a “new gilded age” depends on a model of history in which the tension between inequality and solidarity takes the form of a binary oscillation (often resting on a positivist social scientific form of reasoning), in turn creating the appearance of basic similarity between separate unequal periods. Under this view, however, it is difficult to make sense of the fundamentally different origins of inequality prevailing in 1890 and 2010. Instead, this article argues, historians ought to treat history cumulatively—that is, historically—finding the origins of inequality not in the previous unequal period, but in the previous solidaristic period, and tracing the connections between one period and another rather than viewing them as ideal-typical opposites.

The Pullman Strike of 1894 was a cataclysmic event for the nation. During its violent course, the print media provided an interpretive frame that portrayed the strike in large measure as an immigrant-inspired attack on American laws and democratic customs. Often characterizing the strikers as “foreigners” in the thrall of anarchist ideologies and a tyrannous labor chieftain, journalists painted a stark picture indeed. Employing framing theory, Gramsci's notion of hegemony, and recent insights on the ethnic quality of nationalism, this essay argues that newspapers and other major print periodicals significantly contributed to the formation of nationalist attitudes at a time when many Americans were deeply worried over the direction in which the country was headed.