This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.

The Civil War pension system was the most comprehensive social policy in the late nineteenth-century United States. Between 1880 and 1910, approximately a quarter of the federal government’s expenditure was devoted to this enormous system of military benefits. Scholars have typically charted the development of the pension system through a series of legislative watersheds, detailing its gradual expansion and liberalization. Yet, as this article shows, this was not the only path that the pension system could have followed. By investigating Commissioner of Pensions John Bentley’s five-year administration of the Pension Bureau during the late 1870s, this article explores a story of suppressed – rather than successful – state-building. While Bentley attempted to administer the pension system according to the shibboleths of the contemporary civil service reform movement, the nation’s veterans and their allies pursued a pension system predicated upon an incipient theory of veterans’ entitlements and rights. The Civil War pension system, this article thus reminds us, was not simply the sign of a precocious nineteenth-century state, but the product of a specific type of state, one that reflected a preference for distributive policies and decentralized administration rather than administrative centralization and broad grants of bureaucratic discretion.

This article focuses on a December 1867 altercation between three blackface minstrel managers – Sam Sharpley, Edwin Kelly, and Francis Leon. The conflict, which escalated from a fistfight to a shooting match, resulted in the death of Sharpley’s brother. The incident was a murder among blackface minstrels, but, more than this, it was a murder about minstrelsy. The blackface minstrel show – a deeply racist but wildly popular form of entertainment – was big business in post-Civil War New York City. Throughout 1867, Sharpley’s troupe was locked in a heated rivalry with Kelly and Leon’s company. When Kelly and Leon signed three of Sharpley’s performers and allegedly began spreading rumors about his financial well-being, Sharpley responded violently. As it examines the December confrontation, the events that preceded it, and the first-degree murder trial that followed, this article situates the incident in the larger history of blackface minstrelsy. It also suggests that popular performance culture must be understood with reference to contemporary shifts in post-Civil War American capitalism.

As an ambivalent symbol of America’s relationship with the natural world of wild things, the bear acquired new importance in the years of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency (1901–1909). This article offers an interpretation of the significance of the bear at this time, looking at outdoor sportswriting and the cultural response to Roosevelt’s own bear-hunting exploits in that context. It finds two contrasting ideas of the bear, which appears both as a ferocious beast and as a bearskin trophy, a symbol of nature’s uncontrollable power and also a consumer object. Bear-hunting stories, it is proposed here, thus bridged two worlds: that of wild nature and that of human modernity. This, it suggests, was also the essential cultural function of Theodore Roosevelt’s public persona. Serving as president while assuming the unofficial role of bear-hunter-in-chief, and then becoming indelibly associated with sentimentalized cartoon or teddy bears, his image blurred the distinctions between the White House and the Rocky Mountains, modern life and the natural world. It is suggested in this way that the symbolism of the bear enabled Americans to navigate a way into the twentieth century, avoiding a hard choice between industrial modernity and wild nature by retaining a cultural space for both.

This article examines working-class views of the Tammany Hall political machine and its main opposition parties between 1870 and 1924. Previous historians, relying mostly on accounts from machine politicians like George Washington Plunkitt, have tended to argue that Tammany Hall enjoyed popularity among working-class New Yorkers in this period because it offered them effective forms of material aid through the practice of job patronage and informal acts of charity. This article complicates that assertion by examining accounts and voting records from working-class individuals themselves. It finds that, while patronage and informal charity were indeed popular with working-class voters in this period, they were often dissatisfied with most other aspects of Tammany Hall governance, such as its reputation for corruption or inefficient delivering of city services. Working-class voters only continued to vote for Tammany Hall because the machine’s political rivals were generally led by wealthy reformers who repeatedly and openly disparaged members of the working class in their speeches and supported policies that were even more unpopular with working-class voters than Tammany Hall’s governance.

This article examines white Americans’ concern about jazz dancing around the turn of the twentieth century. Drawing from primary sources in national publications, newspapers, and the archives of the Southern Baptist Convention, the essay finds patterns in the response to jazz dancing that set the stage for the making of moral concern throughout the twentieth century. A focus on young people, interracial sex, the emerging specter of homosexuality, black musical forms, immigrants, and traditional gender roles amounted to what I call “Downfall Voyeurism,” in which American decline is portrayed as a spectacle that elicits both fear and titillation. Downfall Voyeurism helps explain the rise and fall of the jazz panic of the 1910s, but it also presages the central tactics of the New Right that historians more traditionally see as emerging in the 1970s and 1980s.

This article revisits Rayford Logan’s thesis in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877‒1901 to chart how African Americans experienced joy during a racial low point—“the Nadir” of race relations. Using Logan’s claims as a conceptual framework, the article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s position on amusement and everyday Black people’s joyful acts during the post-Reconstruction period to understand “a paradox of pleasure”—feeling jovial during dark times. With the Nadir as a case study, this essay argues that historians may develop Black joy as a historical analytic by asking research questions about Black affect, employing the tools of historical imagination, and concentrating on the small delights of daily life. This essay seeks to inspire curiosity about how exploring Black life from the angle of elation, not sorrow, can produce complex histories of Black subjectivity and feeling. It proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.

This article explores the formation of the University of California amidst widespread populist agitation against university leaders in the 1870s. These complaints were rooted in corruption by the Board of Regents as well as their failure to honor the requirement of the 1862 Morrill Act to offer practical training in “agriculture and the mechanic arts.” It argues that Yosemite served as a vehicle through which representatives of the University of California countered charges of elitism and fostered a reputation for trustworthy stewardship of public land. These efforts were visible to the public through literary texts, newspapers, public lectures, nature writings, and other forms of popular literature. By positioning Yosemite as a site of middlebrow intellectual exchange and an alternative to the demonstration farms established at other land grant institutions, professors such as Joseph LeConte helped quell populist critiques and strengthen affective ties to the university. The resulting shift in popular sentiment helped secure public trust in the university for the remainder of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The Progressive Era was characterized by debates about the future of the United States and the role of individuals, households, and organizations in shaping that future. These debates included those about domestic work, sometimes specifically referred to as the “servant question” or the “servant problem.” This discourse considered not only paid household labor, but also the nature of race, gender, and American life after slavery. This article reviews the servant question in Washington, D.C., and reveals how commentators engaged with modernity and nostalgia to understand the contradiction between their sense of white and African American women’s failures and their belief that both groups of women belonged in white households. The servant question is key cultural context for a 1917 “favorite servant contest.” The second half of the article examines the clubwomen who organized the contest and the experiences of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Theresa Harper. The organizers responded to the D.C. servant question with an effort to carry racial hierarchies into the twentieth century, a vision of the future of household labor very different from that of Black domestic workers.

By focusing on the American Protective Association (A.P.A.), this article demonstrates how anti-Catholicism influenced free labor ideologies and working-class movements during the Gilded Age. The labor movement in the late nineteenth century generally believed that the so-called “dangerous classes” threatened working-class social mobility and economic independence. Religious bigotries, though, often dictated which people and institutions were considered economically dangerous. This article argues that, as anti-Catholic stereotypes collided with emergent anti-monopoly critiques, some working-class reformers saw Catholicism as incompatible with traditional notions of free labor. These reformers embraced anti-Catholic politics and chose to establish, join, or support the A.P.A. Many in the A.P.A. thought Catholic workers lacked the autonomy necessary to be free laborers, leading to intra-union conflict and a distrust of labor organizations with significant Catholic membership. They also charged that the Catholic Church itself opposed free labor and was already profiting off slave labor in institutions like the Houses of the Good Shepherd, a charitable institution, which sought to reform “abandoned women.” Ultimately, the A.P.A. and its anti-Catholic bigotries contributed to the fragmentation of the working class in Gilded Age America in ways that scholars have not yet recognized.

When Ulysses S. Grant succumbed to cancer on July 23, 1885, the nation mourned the loss of one of its greatest generals and the first president to enforce the civil rights of African Americans. As scholars are increasingly recognizing, many Republicans remained committed to the protection of Black suffrage as late as 1890, but in exploring the reaction to Grant’s death, Civil War memory scholars have overlooked the importance of memories of Grant’s presidency. Through an examination of newspapers and biographies in the months after Grant’s death and the immediate years thereafter, up to 1890, this article demonstrates that Americans of all political stripes used their memories of Grant’s presidency to aid their long-term political goals of either restricting or promoting Black civil rights. Democrats and reform-minded Republicans tried to denigrate Grant’s administration for supposed corruption while still applauding his magnanimity at Appomattox. In contrast, their Republican opponents, Black and white, contested this memory by constructing a politically purposeful memory of Grant’s Reconstruction-era politics as part of their ongoing fight to enforce Black voting rights and by extension secure the fruits of Union military victory. In doing so, Americans demonstrated that they remained unreconciled and divided on both the battlefields of Civil War memory and Reconstruction.

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.

This article explores Eugene V. Debs’s experiences at the Moundsville prison and the federal penitentiary in Atlanta (1919–1921). It looks at his relationships with other inmates and his supporters outside of prison and examines the effects prison life had on Debs and his ideology. Most importantly, it closely examines his only book-length work: his prison memoir, Walls and Bars. It explores Debs’s critique of the prison system, the jailing of drug addicts, and the interconnectedness of capitalism and the penitentiary system.

Although political cartoons were a dominant form of visual political media during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, historians have paid little attention to how the contentious tariff debate of the time was reflected in this medium. This article examines the visual strategies used by protectionist agitators, focusing on the cartoons published by the American Protective Tariff League in its weekly newspaper, the American Economist, between 1894 and 1909. Frequently reproduced in other newspapers, these cartoons reached a broad readership. Through an analysis of recurring symbols, metaphors, and visualization patterns, the article shows how protectionists used cartoons to transform the abstract and somewhat esoteric economic issue of tariffs into an attractive political cause that resonated deeply with ordinary Americans. Demonstrating how cartoons served to simplify, dramatize, and emotionalize the tariff issue, the article thus expands our understanding of the cultural forces that underpinned protectionism’s attractiveness as a political ideology around the turn of the century. Overall, the presentation of the tariff issue in these cartoons amounted to a peculiar mix of fearmongering and promise. While the tariff was usually depicted through metaphors of protection and defense against an imminent threat, the abstract concept of protectionism was visually displayed through metaphors evoking a general notion of prosperity as its alleged result.

This article traces the early origins of Black consumer culture as it was portrayed in the Black press from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. It argues that Black newspapers were important agents in shaping how African Americans conceived of and interacted with the evolving commercial sphere around the turn of the century. Papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Broad Ax, the Tulsa Star, and many others celebrated participation in the consumer arena as a respectable and desired practice. They also distinguished between shopping, as a social feminine pursuit, and patronizing Black-owned businesses, which was perceived as a gender-neutral, or even manly, racial duty. Espousing African American elite ideologies such as racial uplift and self-help, Black editors presented any purchasing of goods as an upright activity, which adorned its performer with affluence, respect, and power. Such portrayal encouraged the participation of African Americans in the consumer sphere and implied that it was an arena of similarity rather than difference.

This article, set in El Paso, Texas, in 1908, concerns immigration inspector Robert L. Dodd who was accused and administratively removed by the federal Immigration Bureau for facilitating the introduction of undocumented Japanese immigrants into the United States. The article examines the government’s case against Dodd and argues that his dismissal was not only a miscarriage of justice but also may have been structured to scapegoat Dodd as part of the ongoing efforts in the Progressive Era toward civil service reforms within federal service.