What is climate history? How can it serve as a lens through which to view other historical questions? This roundtable identifies key themes in Gilded Age and Progressive Era climate history, and demonstrates that this era was pivotal for both scientific and cultural perceptions of climate. It also shows how climate history can illuminate other subjects, including histories of science, medicine, health, and race. Further, it considers present-day implications. This roundtable began as a session sponsored by the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the 2024 Organization of American Historians annual meeting in New Orleans. What follows is a conversation based on that panel, a selected bibliography of scholarly sources, and a collection of primary sources for teaching climate history.

This article explores how capital-labor relations were conceptualized in late nineteenth-century protectionist thought. Taking as an example the American Protective Tariff League (APTL), a national protectionist pressure group that was heavily influenced by industrial interests and attempted to popularize protectionist ideas by issuing newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets, and posters, it reconstructs the arguments protectionist industrialists used in their agitation targeted at industrial workers. Following the protectionist wage argument, the APTL made the supposed wage benefit to laborers in protected industries the center of their argument. This wage argument was strongly intertwined with nativist and Anglophobic stereotypes. Further, the APTL proposed a unity of interests between capital and labor in tariff matters that hinged on a nationalist interpretation of economic matters, in which the American national economy was conceptualized as being endangered by imports and competition from other national economies but simultaneously as a harmonious cooperation of capital and labor on the inside. Analyzing the organized labor movement’s response to such claims, the article argues that this sort of agitation, while important to industrialists’ arguments, probably had little influence on workers and their stance on the tariff issue.

During World War II, Disney films on Nazism, health, and United States–Latin American friendship flickered across screens throughout Latin America. They were the centerpiece of an unprecedented propaganda program by the United States, and they were shown to Latin Americans both in theaters and through mobile projectors by the Office of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA). While the OIAA and the Disney films have received considerable scholarly attention, the complex collaboration between the government organization, communication scientists, the animation film studio, and local actors in creating, distributing, and measuring propaganda has not. With the goal of creating favorable attitudes toward the United States in the minds of individual Latin Americans, the OIAA and Disney developed a novel propaganda approach based on entertainment and education. They coupled it with a comprehensive distribution system based on local projectionists who showed the films to millions of Latin Americans and measured their reactions. Local governments allowed and supported these free screenings to bolster their own popularity. Latin American voices to criticize the US instrumentalization of Disney were few, and the overall reception of the films was very positive. On the basis of an inadequate evaluation that equated popularity and reach with effect, the Disney films were considered successful propaganda by the OIAA, paving the way for a global application of the new propaganda approach. Disney propaganda for Latin America was driven by the involved actor’s unbounded faith in film’s suitability for propaganda and must thus be understood as a hype around the untapped potential of a relatively new medium.

This article examines a contentious, failed unionization drive among 140 Latino cemetery workers in the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles between 1988 and 1991. In exploring the bitter fight between Archbishop (later Cardinal) Roger Mahony and the workers and their hopeful union, the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union (ACTWU), this piece centers the voices of cemetery workers as they fought for dignity and a recognition of the spiritual and human significance of their labors within an increasingly commodified and corporatized cemetery industry. These workers’ struggle also highlights important, but underexplored, twin transformations in American labor, faith politics, and culture in the late twentieth century: intensifying unionization efforts at religious institutions (such as cemeteries, schools, and hospitals) and an attendant fracturing and remaking of labor-Catholic alliances.

Two of the world’s greatest boxers—Muhammad Ali of Louisville, KY and George Foreman of Houston, TX—met for the legendary “Rumble in the Jungle” in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) in 1974. With concerts by the African American “Godfather of Soul” James Brown and South African singer-songwriter Miriam Makeba, nicknamed “Mama Africa,” the entwining tones of the U.S. civil rights era and anti-Apartheid movement augmented a cultural moment that displayed Pan-African, Black nationalist, and anti-imperial connections. However, the appearance of an insidious symbol from each aforementioned era is what decidedly swayed the local population against Foreman and for Ali.1

This article classifies individual lexemes in Chinese dialects into four categories: popular, learnèd, colloquial, and literary. Popular and learnèd refer to the origins of a word: whether it has been transmitted orally or learned in an educational context. Colloquial and literary refer to usage. The traditional Chinese terms for distinguishing character readings, wén 文 and bái 白, literally ‘written’ and ‘spoken’, do not correspond neatly to the four categories that are proposed here. This article illustrates the differences between all six terms, mainly by using standard Mandarin and Běijīng dialect, and secondarily by using words from Mĭn and other dialects.

The extinction of the passenger pigeon is one of the best-known cautionary tales in American environmental history. At one time, between three and five billion passenger pigeons blanketed the skies over central and eastern North America. Passenger pigeons were swift (they could fly as fast as sixty miles per hour) and gregarious (in the winter, thousands would roost together on a single tree, occasionally causing limbs to break beneath their weight). They survived primarily on the beechnuts, acorns, and chestnuts found in the mixed hardwood forests of the eastern United States. Between 1810 and 1867, Americans destroyed much of that habitat, clearing 200,000 square miles of woodlands (an area equal to the size of Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin combined). The passenger pigeon was also tasty, which is why between about 1870 and 1900, market hunters reduced what remained of the population to only a few dozen. The last of the species, named Martha by its keepers, died in the Cincinnati Zoo in 1914. Even more than the North American bison, a few hundred of whom survived the hide hunters who slaughtered millions of them in the Great Plains in the late nineteenth century, the passenger pigeon’s story exemplifies the wastefulness and shortsightedness of Americans’ exploitation of animals in the early years of industrial capitalism.