This article explores the sudden spate of stories concerning the so-called “blue gum negro” (the Blue Gum) that circulated in the national press from the late 1880s to the late 1890s. These reports concerned purportedly blue-gummed, Black assailants, whose bite was alleged to be poisonous, and of whom African Americans were supposedly terrified. This article argues that, although these narratives reinforced white notions of Black criminality and credulity, they marked a particular moment of racialization, in which fears of bodily contagion, generated by the recent revolution in germ theory, were harnessed to notions of embodied racial difference, to express and galvanize white anxieties about racial impurity. Because Blue Gums embodied dysgenic menace, white journalists and writers were often reluctant to disavow their existence, instead capitalizing on the slippage between figurative and literal language that characterized discourse on race. However, in appropriating Black culture and presenting a figure from folklore as a racial type, white writers betrayed not only the essentially superstitious character of racial thought but also the interwoven nature of dominant and subjugated cultures in the United States.

This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political entities, including all three branches of government, took in response to Diggs and Caminetti’s actions highlights some of the major social changes gripping the nation. Moral panics can be investigated as crucial historical sites of contestation, revealing efforts to neutralize or turn back the societal changes perceived to be the greatest threat to the prevailing social power structure—in this case foreigners, the new leisure culture, the liberalization of sexual attitudes, and the threat of female independence. Understanding the origins and repercussions of past moral panics can help identify, understand, and possibly defuse future panics.

Literature and history as objects of study and fields of inquiry have shaped each other in profound if asymmetrical ways. This introduction provides a brief account of how these disciplines intersect in the GAPE and the contemporary era, emphasizing concerns with expertise and amateurism that also emerge in many of the articles in this special issue. Those concerns, in turn, relate to what the articles show are literature’s pedagical functions in the GAPE and the present moment and within and beyond the classroom. As it argues, literature’s pedagogical dimensions challenge distinctions between teaching, research, and activism in the context of current debates about if and how historical and literary study should be presentist and politically committed.

In 1893, Simon Pokagon, a leader of the “unremoved” Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, published a birchbark pamphlet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke. This story condemned settlers for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and removing them west of the Mississippi River in service of their “civilization.” Pokagon’s Rebuke remains one of the most cited texts in Native American history. But what happened to Pokagon’s message after the Chicago World’s Fair? This paper analyzes five Potawatomi Removal stories told at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Midwestern settlers found their answer to “the Indian side” of the Removal question by telling the “Potawatomi” perspective of local history; featuring “authentic” representations of Native peoples in their stories and as witnesses to their efforts; perpetuating a myth that all the Potawatomi had been removed; condemning the actions of their “dishonorable and dishonest” forefathers; and publicly acknowledging that they were occupying stolen land. By claiming that the sons of the present were not the forefathers of the past, non-Indians were settling the story of Potawatomi Removal. In the process, they gave their community and their region a past that was simultaneously romantic and tragic, positioning themselves as its inheritors and interpreters.

The late nineteenth-century policy of allotting tribal lands into individually owned tracts is appropriately interpreted as a destructive federal effort to expropriate Native land and eliminate tribal identities. The Ottawa Tribe in Indian Territory, however, had divergent objectives in supporting allotment. This article argues the Ottawa advocated for allotment and U.S. citizenship to escape intrusive federal control over their lands and resources. Although they embraced policies aimed at eliminating tribal existence, the Ottawa rejected the intentions behind those policies, and instead, they drew on long-established community attributes of mobility and interconnection with outsiders to resituate their nation within American society. By centering Ottawa perspectives, this article disrupts progressive narratives that denote the pursuit of U.S. citizenship as an effort to secure equal inclusion. It underscores U.S. citizenship and allotment as tools of settler colonial domination and demonstrates how the Ottawa subversively deployed U.S. citizenship and private property rights to combat colonial administration and maintain tribal sovereignty. Examining a policy often glossed over as invariably imposed on Native nations, this article underscores the necessity of analyzing Native community dynamics and political strategies to understand the implementation and impact of allotment.

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thousands of middle-class youths published their own amateur newspapers. These periodicals were printed using the so-called toy (or “novelty”) press, a portable tabletop device that helped democratize word processing. Children often used their presses to compose miniature novels and short stories. They then shared their prose with a national community of fellow juvenile writers collectively known as “Amateurdom.” Adolescent fiction explored an array of subjects, but the frontier, territorial expansion, and empire in the West became some of its particular fixations. All that imperial storytelling, however, possessed a rich subtext. Boys and girls, reacting to late-nineteenth-century changes in the lived experience of childhood, used their printing presses to challenge various constraints imposed upon them. But in so doing, they both perpetuated and reinforced a pernicious culture of settler colonialism that celebrated the subjugation of American Indians. Ultimately, the amateur publications of children remind us that fiction is not exclusively an adult enterprise. The creative output of young people provides important insight into an underexplored realm of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s literary world.

While historians have recently called attention to the racial assumptions that shaped the debates over monetary reform in either the colonial Philippines or China during the first years of the twentieth century, this article analyzes the crosscurrents between efforts to “civilize” and “develop” Filipino and Chinese monetary systems. It first examines the history of the Philippine money question (1899–1903), revealing anxieties about the apparent attachment Native Filipinos and Chinese had to silver currency. U.S. colonial officials were ambivalent toward the Native Filipinos, seeing them as possibly teachable, but so-called silver savagism was seen as too deeply engrained in the Chinese community, making the Chinese appear as a threat to monetary stability. In the last section, the article turns to China, revealing how the outcome of the Philippine money question shaped how U.S. monetary experts approached their efforts to reform China’s monetary system. Throughout this process, U.S. colonial officials and monetary experts defined the Philippines and China (“silver countries”) and Filipinos and Chinese (“silver-handling types”) as overlapping objects of development. This analysis reveals how development was simultaneously an economic, racial, and imperial language.

In 1911, Elaine Goodale Eastman, longtime editor of writing by her husband, Indigenous writer Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), published Yellow Star, a narrative for white family audiences. Both the Eastmans’ already-troubled marriage and their parenting of mixed-race children illuminate the text, as does their history of linked authorial experiences. Anticipating twenty-first-century battles over competing historical narratives about Indigenous peoples in school curricula and public discourse, Yellow Star’s depiction of history-in-the-making underscores intersections between the domestic and the public, as well as between communal lived experience and larger social issues. The text simultaneously claims a potential role for young people’s literature in the cultural construction of historical understanding. Eastman’s main character, Stella/Yellow Star, arrives in a fictional New England village as an orphan of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Determined to continue valuing her Indigenous community, Stella models both a particular brand of assimilation and resistance to its would-be totalizing power. Before returning west to teach children of her tribe, she also articulates an alternative historical voice. Yellow Star draws on Eastman’s background as a white woman involved in assimilationist education. Progressive in her commitment to on-reservation learning rather than boarding schools, Goodale Eastman was nonetheless implicated in white culture’s racial hierarchies.

In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.

While scholars are revitalizing political history, they continue to neglect the formal yet dynamic institutional framework that shaped not merely the traditional subjects of election campaigns and governance but also newer concerns dealing with political participation, representation, power, legitimacy, and conflict. This article focuses on the 1893 senatorial elections in the six states where neither major party held the legislative majority on joint ballot necessary to elect a U.S. senator. This fraught situation derived from the success of the new Populist party and threatened the customary Republican control of both state politics and the U.S. Senate. By examining the previously overlooked actions and interactions of election and canvassing boards, state courts, and party committees with electoral rules, judicial norms, and legislative procedures after the general election of 1892, this article demonstrates that election outcomes were often contingent upon factors other than electoral mobilization, great issues, and popular opinion. Partisanship and the search for power produced “conspiracies” that corrupted basic electoral institutions, subverted voting results, denied rightful representation, violated democratic norms and practices, and provoked popular unrest.

During the Great War, J.P. Morgan bankers Thomas W. Lamont, Henry P. Davison, and Dwight W. Morrow expanded their visions of organizing across distances and supported the development of spaces where like-minded individuals could make coordinated decisions regarding the stability of industrial capitalism. These financial elites focused not only on profits but also on deeper ideas. Their experience organizing across distances, first domestically and then across the Atlantic, demonstrates the importance of these financiers to visions of global economic governance centered on information exchange and communication, intimate long-distance relationships, and deliberation among perceived equals, which are essential elements of merchant banking. Their visions further reflected a hierarchical and racial understanding of a liberal global order. Highly flexible in their strategies, these bankers possessed long-term views of national and global development that engaged overlapping connections among networks, institutions, and the public that privileged the creation of transatlantic spaces for deliberation and socialization among Western economic elites.

An analysis of Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveals how popular literature can serve as an important introduction to signature issues of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration are highlighted in the novel—as well as attendant problems including poverty, machine politics, child labor, and prejudice and discrimination. Profound ignorance about sexuality and conception abound in a religious culture that made premarital sex and birth control sinful and shameful, with unhappy marriages and unwanted children the result. As poverty and deviant sexuality abound, eugenics is touted as a sensible solution. The novel helps to explain why there was no organized rebellion or revolution when the struggling poor found that the promise of upward mobility was elusive. Characters have differing definitions of the American Dream. Some seek respite in religion, leisure activities, or alcohol. Others find hope in a variety of reform measures, including public health and education, settlement houses, and unions. The novel ends as the technology that made the nation’s industrialization and urbanization possible continues to produce new marvels that will transform the lives of the urban poor, bringing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to a close.

This article explores the role of the Little Mothers’ Leagues in New York City, clubs created by public health authorities to educate working-class girls as young as eight years old who took care of their younger siblings while their parents worked. The Little Mothers’ Leagues served as an essential link between social reform and eugenic public health programming during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Eugenic maternalism, as articulated by the Little Mothers’ Leagues, distilled a sense of Americanness into a set of hygienic practices and rituals that could be easily understood and imitated. Through the Little Mothers’ Leagues, eugenic maternalist reformers addressed essential questions regarding the role of social reform in the “Americanization” process, the role of young girls as citizens and as entry points to the immigrant home, and the extent to which environmental reform could regulate the immigrant family. Examining the Little Mothers’ Leagues as a project that was both eugenic and maternalist allows us to better understand the ways that eugenic thinking permeated popular discourse through child welfare reform and domestic science.

This essay examines the relationship between race, work, and exclusion during the Long Red Summer of 1919. I focus on several “transportation towns” of railroad employees in Appalachia to argue for the combined importance of labor history and racial ideology in attempts to understand wartime violence. Academic and federal government investigations inform my analysis, as does the robust body of scholarship on railroad labor. After examining racism embedded in railroad work, unions, and community life, the essay then turns to the Wilson administration’s nationalization of the roads during the war. Wartime changes resulted in higher wages for Black workers and many perceived threats to the racialized labor hierarchy. What was once white railroaders’ effort to exclude African Americans from certain jobs became one to expel them from the industry entirely. In several transportation towns that experienced wartime migration, however, this impulse transformed into a campaign to remove Black people from their communities once and for all. I cite testimony from a grand jury trial of an expulsion, railroad union journals, and newspaper accounts of mob violence that made it clear that the transportation towns belonged to white labor at the end of the Long Red Summer.

The misremembering by Americans of the Spanish-Cuban-American War was not an accident of either time or place. Rather, it was a collaboration between the citizenry, political and business elites, and the military-industrial complex centered on the cult of the fallen soldier. As businessmen carved up the Cuban landscape and the military occupied Guantanamo Bay, the war dead played one last service of memory. American commemoration of fallen soldiers acted as a shroud to obscure the practices of American imperialism. The recovery of the war dead thus provides an interesting example of how officials wanted Americans to remember the conflict. Most of the fallen died from disease rather than combat. Recovering the war dead thus entailed an elaborate process of sanitizing the “sick” dead and disinfecting the remains of warriors buried in foreign and tropical soil to repatriate them back to the United States. The metaphorical intersected with the medical in presenting dead soldiers from an imperialistic war with “clean and sterile bones” that would neither threaten the health of the general public nor their collective memory. Such a re-presentation would help shape how Americans remember a clean and sterile “Splendid Little War” without acknowledging the mucky details of empire-building.