This article examines the strategies used by charity applicants of the 1880s to present themselves in ways most likely to win relief from the Indianapolis Charity Organization Society (COS), while also preserving autonomy from an organization willing to use threats of starvation or institutionalization to force compliance from the poor. Investigators treated charity applicants as objects to be scientifically observed and categorized and then molded to conform to middle-class mores, but the applicants’ responses ranged from accommodation to complete defiance. Successful applications to the COS ultimately depended more on the vagaries of the investigator than on the strategies chosen by the applicant. Those applications often led to decisions that illustrate the draconian, punitive tendencies suggested by the leading theoretical treatises in the scientific charity movement. However, they also reveal instances where charity applicants guided investigators toward more generous decisions.

In recent years, historians have paid increased attention to the Civil War pension system created for Union army soldiers and their families. It has come to be seen as a milestone in the evolution of U.S. social policy. Despite the overall appearance of generosity and of unbiased treatment for applicants, however, individuals actually experienced the system very differently based on the social status of the soldier involved. Looking at pension legislation, its implementation, and nearly one thousand pension claim files, this article argues that three types of status discrimination appeared in the distribution of pensions: Pension laws paid larger amounts to officers and their families, the Pension Bureau used ability to perform manual labor to determine the level of disability regardless of the applicants' true ability to earn a living, and claims based on the service of officers generally were decided more quickly and more favorably than those of enlisted men. Because military ranks reflected the soldiers' civilian social position—most manual laborers served as enlisted men, for example—these biases meant that individuals of higher social status received significantly better treatment than those of lower civilian status.

Efforts to write the history of the African American migrations of the Civil War era, the Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era began soon after the start of these historically significant movements. Early scholarship labored to surmount the same methodological obstacles faced by modern scholars, notably scarce documentation, but still produced pathbreaking studies such as W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro, Carter Woodson's A Century of Negro Migration, and Clyde Kiser's Sea Island to City. Modern scholarship since the 1950s falls into eight distinct genres. An assessment of representative works in each genre reveals a variety of configurations of strengths and weaknesses, while offering guidelines for future research.

The rationale for teaching history proposed by most professional historians in the 1890s was based on faculty psychology—the theory that the mind was composed of mental faculties such as memory and will that could be strengthened like muscles. However, over the course of the decade this approach was gradually replaced by a functional approach to mind and society, which had roots in the new psychology of Wilhelm Wundt. This development was accompanied by a pedagogical shift in learning theory from an emphasis on exertion of the students' will to engaging students' interest. John Dewey, William James, and the American followers of German pedagogical theorist, Johann Frederich Herbart, directly challenged the faculty psychology of the German-inspired professional historians but still placed history at the center of their pedagogical schemes. As a result, history gained a central place in U.S. elementary and secondary curriculum during these years, but paradoxically the new psychology gradually eroded the influence of professional historians on the curriculum, because they failed to acknowledge these emerging pedagogical and psychological theories.

The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

On September 18, 1873, the announcement of Jay Cooke and Company's bankruptcy sent Wall Street to a panic, and the country to a long, harsh depression. Americans interpreted this economic crisis in the light of the acrimonious financial debates born of the Civil War—the money question chief among them. The consequences transformed American politics. Ideologically ill-equipped to devise cohesive economic policies, political parties split dangerously along sectional lines (between the Northeast and the Midwest). Particularly divided over President U.S. Grant's veto of the 1874 Inflation Bill, the Republican Party decisively lost the 1874 congressional elections. As a Democratic majority in the House spelled the doom of Reconstruction, the ongoing divisions of both parties on economic issues triggered a political realignment. The dramatic 1876 elections epitomized a new political landscape that would last for twenty years: high instability in power at the national level and what has been described as the “politics of inertia.” Therefore, by closely following the ramifications of the 1873 panic, this article proposes an explanation of how an economic crisis transformed into a pivotal political event.

Theodore Roosevelt made reform of the U.S. Army Officer Corps a priority during his presidency. He felt compelled to act because of the problems that the army experienced during the war with Spain. As a volunteer soldier, Roosevelt had witnessed the shortcomings of many of the top-ranking officers in meeting the physical and organizational demands of the fighting, but he also acted because he wanted high-minded, intelligent, and physically fit leaders who could inspire his fellow citizens to a greater sense of duty in post-frontier America. Roosevelt's efforts to promote promising army officers to top commands and mandate physical fitness standards would prove disruptive, as he elevated officers out of the normal line of promotion. These practices would, in turn, generate protests in Congress and from within the military. The resulting controversies would cause Roosevelt to fall short of his goals for improving army leadership, roil civil-military relations, and demonstrate his limits as a political leader.

This essay examines the 1903 U.S. diplomatic mission to Ethiopia, which offers an unusual perspective on racial attitudes in the Progressive Era. Desirous of exploring new trade possibilities, the Theodore Roosevelt administration sent Robert P. Skinner to Addis Ababa to sign a reciprocity treaty with Emperor Menelik II. The timing of the mission had much to do with Roosevelt's global interests, but it happened to occur at a critical point for Ethiopia, which had recently thwarted an attempted Italian invasion. This victory delighted African Americans, especially those with a pan-Africanist perspective. Black Americans had long identified with the idea of Ethiopia, but they now identified with the actual nation and its leader. Black writers argued that the Ethiopians had triumphed over modern racism when they triumphed over the Italians. Those involved in Skinner's trip had a different view of the racial implications of Ethiopia's success. To them, the victory was that of a Semitic people whose triumphs were less startling. When talking about Ethiopia, black and white American observers revealed more about their own preconceptions and hopes than about the country to which the United States was making overtures.

At the height of the Progressive Era a number of social scientists, educational leaders, and politicians called for the reform of intercollegiate football. Since the 1880s football had become a popular spectacle, and many were concerned that it was corrupting the country's universities and college men. This article considers the progressive movement to reform football in the context of programs to make the modern American university useful at the turn of the century—including the Wisconsin Idea of state government developed in Madison and the University of Chicago's sponsorship of settlement houses, social work, and university extension. Although many progressives wanted the university to affect society, most were less enthusiastic about the prospect that elements of that society (what Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner dubbed “public influence”) would affect the university. Social scientists theorized the relationship between the university and the public and constructed an intellectual basis for football reform. Reforms proposed and in some cases adopted demonstrated ambivalence regarding football's academic and public role. Reformers wanted to preserve the popular, profitable, and potentially educational enterprise of football, but they also hoped to curtail its influence over burgeoning universities. The Progressive Era effort to control college football and channel it into constructive directions in many ways demonstrates the paradoxical nature of Progressive Era reform and inadvertently contributed to the institutionalization of “big time” intercollegiate athletics.