Historians have long been intrigued by the role that the press played in McKinley’s decision to intervene in Cuba in 1898. Most, however, have focused their attention on the decade of the 1890s, ignoring the long history of interventionism aimed at Cuba. This essay uses the story of William L. Crittenden to explore the many instances where interventionists tried (and failed) to drum up support for Cuban intervention. Crittenden was executed by the Spanish in 1851 after a failed filibuster raid. Over the next four decades, interventionists wrote newspaper accounts, held boisterous public meetings, penned poems, and published novels that demanded revenge upon Spain. Yet Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Ulysses Grant, and Grover Cleveland did not choose to intervene. By focusing on nearly five decades as opposed to a single year, this essay calls into question the idea that the press reflected public opinion and challenges the larger assertion that the “Yellow Press” propelled the United States into a war with Spain. Whether they shouted “Remember the Maine,” “Remember the Virginius,” or “Remember Crittenden,” writers, editors, poets, and journalists simply did not have the power to control public opinion and certainly did not prove to be successful at manipulating presidents to intervene.

Throughout the Progressive Era, settlement houses in the urban Northeast and Midwest operated robust summer camp programs for the children of their neighborhoods. Each summer, campers enjoyed two weeks of hiking, swimming, nature study, and relaxation. This article argues that summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement-house workers during the Progressive Era. Unlike smoke abatement, sanitation reform, or playground construction, which addressed isolated components of the urban environment, camps allowed them to articulate a deeply ecological critique of the industrial city. Settlement-house workers constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to atmosphere, city streets, and immigrants’ homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. Summer camps demonstrate that settlement-house workers’ environmental philosophy permeated their reform agendas, influencing social work and recreation in addition to politics and public health.

At first glance, international arbitration—a legalistic method for the peaceful settlement of disputes among nations—may seem like a topic belonging only to the formal, male-dominated realms of diplomacy and international law. Most men in the late nineteenth century certainly thought so, and many historians since have treated it as such. But prominent women like May Wright Sewall and Belva Lockwood, and mass organizations like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, took a lively interest in the subject in the 1890s. In that interest lay the roots of women’s foreign policy activism that led to their participation in debates over the War of 1898 and their peace efforts during and after World War I. International arbitration appealed to women because it complemented their better-known campaigns for temperance, suffrage, and other causes. As a more “civilized” method of resolving conflicts, arbitration was both a symbol of and a prerequisite for a more advanced, temperate, and equal society. It thus became a key component of women’s arguments for inclusion in the public and political life of the nation.

This article discusses speech and hearing disabled Americans’ claims to citizenship during World War I, and the ways American policymakers sought to rehabilitate American soldiers treated in the U.S. Army Section of Defects of Hearing and Speech—or those classified after the Section’s closure as deaf, hard-of-hearing, or “speech defective.” Ultimately, I argue that one’s aural communication abilities were indicators of worthiness in American society and that this was especially the case during World War I, when tensions about speech and hearing heightened within and outside of the Deaf community due to significant pressures placed on Americans to show support for the war. Such pressures also shaped the experiences of American soldiers treated for speech and hearing disabilities after 1918, by suggesting that their service to the United States could not be complete until they were successfully rehabilitated through lip-reading training. To be able to aurally communicate signified the veterans’ sound citizenship in a literal and a metaphorical sense.

During the First World War, the term “essential business” was used initially in military procurement, and then in disease control when pandemic influenza struck. Essential businesses were exempt from restrictions imposed in the interest of national defense or public health, so debates about essential business concerned the necessity of various goods and services to the consumer. Ultimately, the concept of essential business depended on a shared understanding of the American consumer’s rights and duties as a citizen. On the one hand, consumers furthered the state’s interests by complying with, interpreting, implementing, and enforcing public-health restrictions. On the other, what contemporaries called “the American standard of living” entitled citizens to maintain relatively large expenditures. This relationship between citizenship and consumption explains the economy’s surprising stability in 1918. The flu did not cause a depression because social norms authorized most consumer expenditures as legitimate and appropriate, even during the wartime epidemic. “Essential” work is theorized using the Marxist concept of socially necessary labor, which relates productivity and purchasing power to norms of consumption.