Few figures appear so frequently and yet remain so poorly understood in the narrative of the Gilded Age as does Henry George. This historiographic essay traces George’s evolving role in historians’ accounts of the political drama of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. George’s popular memory has been shaped overwhelmingly by a few influential survey accounts that have tended to depict him either as a rear-guard apologist of old, small-town ideals or as one of many radical critics of modernity who were stamped out at the end of the nineteenth century. More recent historians have instead sought to present a nuanced George and to emphasize his more concrete and underappreciated contributions to American political thought; but even in many of their hands George’s unique ideas concerning land monopoly have proven difficult. In addition to charting these developments, this essay offers a lens for making sense of the “Prophet of San Francisco” in the twenty-first century.

Thérèse Humbert was a lowly French peasant until she saved the life of an American millionaire who left her a vast inheritance, but after twenty years of litigation over said inheritance, a massive web of deception unraveled. The millionaire had never existed, his “nephews” were actually Humbert’s brothers, and Humbert herself had swindled Europe’s moneyed men and working-class laborers out of millions of francs. Overnight, Humbert became a celebrity in the American press, even after she was convicted and imprisoned for fraud. The French swindler’s onslaught of coverage in American newspapers shaped Gilded Age anxieties about money, credit, and the place of women in an ever-changing world. Gender ideologies concerning women’s place in the economy and turn-of-the-century financial instability made the Humbert swindle irresistible to the American press, who saw the story as an opportunity to moralize about women and finance. The sheer scale of Humbert’s fraud and its American coverage make the story remarkable today as an astonishing episode in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, especially among cultural historians and those interested in the New History of Capitalism.

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.