Between the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century the context for petitioning changed. The number of public petitions addressed to the House of Commons declined, and commentators and politicians increasingly regarded petitioning as redundant in an era of mass electoral politics ushered in by the Third Reform Act (1884–85). Yet, as this chapter shows, petitioning did not decline but was rather reinvented in this period. Campaigners increasingly addressed singular mass petitions to a range of different authorities, including the monarch and Downing Street, in ways that emphasised the performative presentation of petitions to maximise coverage in the mass media. High-profile examples, such as petitions organised by the militant suffragettes or the Ulster Covenant and Declaration (1912) associated with Unionist opposition to Irish Home Rule, were part of a broader reimagining of petitioning with the UK’s nascent democracy. Finally, contemporaries also considered petitions to be a mechanism for calling referendums, as shown in a number of bills of the time, and also in the numerous mass petitions from Unionists and others to the king calling for Home Rule to be referred to the people via referendum or general election. As this chapter shows, while the practice of petitioning changed during an era of rapid democratisation it retained an important place within UK popular politics and political culture.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

The Black press was produced almost exclusively by male writers and editors. Those writers, joined by a small number of women authors, frequently addressed themselves to women readers or took up women’s issues. While the papers often invoked the ideal of Black women leading fulfilled lives in the home, caring for their husbands and children, they also acknowledged that for most Afrodescendants, that ideal was simply unattainable. Writers supported the efforts of Black (and White) domestic workers to organize and achieve the workplace protections enjoyed by industrial and commercial workers.Motherhood was a fraught and frequent topic in the Black press. The papers worried about high rates of illegitimacy and single motherhood in their communities, and enjoined mothers to prepare their children to lead honorable and productive lives.Women’s contributions to the papers offer evidence of Black women's political participation, before and after the advent of female suffrage, and the limits of that participation. Finally, female beauty was a regular topic in the Black press, which offered advice on how to achieve it, public contests to determine who best embodied it, and debate over fashion from the perspective of both morality and women’s equality.

The Mexican–US War ends with the top half of Mexico – and its people – subsumed into the voracious US empire. A new musical genre – the Corrido – emerges from the new borderlands. The California Gold Rush produces a wealth of song from as far east as Scandinavia and as far west as China. US nativists sing against the arriving Germans and Irish Catholics, but they reserve their greatest musical venom for the Chinese in the form of the “John Chinaman” minstrel stereotype. Against such vicious representations, we have the Songs of Gold Mountain to reflect the true humanity of Chinese immigrants. In the wake of the Seneca Falls Convention, songs of women’s suffrage resound across the landscape, including those of Sojourner Truth. The Hutchinson Family Singers become the first US “supergroup” with their abolition songs, and Black challenges to the minstrelsy of E. P. Christy, Stephen Foster, and others continue, not only through the oratory of Frederick Douglass and songs of the Underground Railroad, but also through the operatic accomplishments of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield.As the country careens toward the irrepressible schism of civil war, song becomes a highly supercharged, sectional arena.

The new century’s radical songwork takes in the victims of the Triangle Factory fire, Mother Jones, and the bards of the Industrial Workers of the World (with Joe Hill at their pinnacle). The IWW’s Italian songwriters – Arturo Giovannitti and Efrem Bartoletti – emerge as important voices, as do the Finnish songwriters of the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, and the multinational corridistas of the Ludlow Massacre in Colorado. Other revolutionary arenas include the vaudeville stage and the drag club, where the cross-dressing of Julian Eltinge and Bothwell Browne challenges the tyranny of heterosexual norms. Charlotte Perkins Gilman emerges as a leading songwriter for women’s suffrage and joins the ranks of those opposing US entry into the coming European war. As the government clamps down on the proliferation of antiwar activism, Tin Pan Alley leads the shift from antiwar to prowar songwriting. With the US now at war, Black soldiers produce a powerful body of song reflecting the outrages of segregation in the ranks. Black composers James Reese Europe and Noble Sissle turn their wartime service into pioneering art-song, and Lakota warriors –formerly forbidden to sing – lend their voices to the war effort. The Armistice produces a wealth of song celebration, but a new musical menace arises in the form of the Ku Klux Klan and its vicious songs.

This chapters analyzes Canada’s struggles during two world wars, a global depression, and the onset of mass consumer society. The Great War claimed the lives of 65,000 soldiers and exacerbated cultural and regional cleavages. In the 1920s mass consumer society, secularism, and youth culture began to challenge the Victorian values that had hitherto served as a basis for social cohesion. As a nation dependent on the export of primary resources, Canada suffered deeply from the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the economic crisis lifted with the outbreak of the Second World War, social divisions persisted. The turmoil resulting from wars and depression encouraged new political parties and movements (Progressive, Farmer, Labour, Communist, Maritime Rights, Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, Social Credit, Union Nationale, and Reconstruction) that undermined the two-party system. Women struggled to translate the franchise, which they won federally in 1918, into political power. In 1929 the British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (Canada’s highest court of appeal until 1947) declared women “persons” under the law but discrimination against women remained rampant. Dominions in the British Empire were accorded full autonomy by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but internal differences blunted its practical applications in Canada until after the Second World War.