On May 28,1912, Katherine Philips Edson took her seven-year-old son by the hand and headed for her local polling precinct. Women had recently won suffrage in California, and Edson went to exercise her new right. This was a special referendum election, and she needed to consider a number of very different issues. Should she support the creation of an Aqueduct Investigation Board? Should she allow the city to collect funds to erect a new city hall? On this day, the question on the ballot that interested her most was the one that she had played a role in crafting. It read, “Shall the ordinance providing for the tuberculin test to be applied to dairy cattle producing milk furnished to the City of Los Angeles, or its inhabitants, be adopted?” After casting her vote, she remained outside with her son at her side and attempted to persuade the electorate that they should vote in favor of the tuberculin ordinance because it protected the public, especially children, from tuberculosis. The Los Angeles Herald photographed her plea for pure milk and placed it on the front page of the evening edition. Much to Edson's dismay, however, the bill was resoundingly defeated.

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, set in Manhattan in the “early 1870s,” begins with Christine Nilsson singing at the Academy of Music. The opera is Gounod's Faust. The “world of fashion” has assembled in the boxes. In their own eyes the embodiment of “New York,” the fashionables are prisoners of convention: Newland Archer arrives late because “it was ‘not the thing’ to arrive early at the opera; and what was or was not ‘the thing’ played a part as important in Newland Archer's New York as the inscrutable totem terrors that had ruled the destinies of his forefathers thousands of years ago.” Newland takes his place among “all the carefully-brushed, white-waist coated, buttonhole-flowered gentlemen who succeeded each other in the club box, exchanged friendly greetings with him, and turned their opera glasses critically on the circle of ladies who were the product of the system.” That “the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences” seems “as natural to Newland Archer as all the other conventions on which his life was moulded: such as the duty of using two silver-baked brushes with his monogram in blue enamel to part his hair, and of never appearing in society without a flower (preferably a gardenia) in his buttonhole.” The box opposite belongs to “old Mrs. Manson Mingott, whose monstrous obesity had long since made it impossible for her to attend the Opera.” It contains a surprise: the Countess Olenska. This finding is assessed by Laurence Lefferts; the “foremost authority of ‘form’ in New York,” he has devoted long hours to such questions as when to wear a black tie with evening clothes and the matter of pumps versus Oxfords for the feet. The countess is next appraised by Sillerton Jackson, as great an expert on “family” as Leffert is on form.

When I retired in 1991 my first project was to revise The Response to Industrialism, which covered the years from 1877 to 1914. These, of course, are the years we call the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. When the University of Chicago Press asked if I would undertake a revision as part of their desire to update several books in the History of American Civilization Series, I readily agreed. I did so with some instinctive understanding that much about the book would undergo revision, but just what I did not have clearly in mind. Much had changed in the profession, and much had changed in the way I thought about that period in American history. As I worked my way through the first edition the details of those changes became more clear. And so I prepared an introduction to the revision that outlined for the reader just what had changed in my thinking over those forty years.

Published in 1873, Mark Twain's and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age went on stage two years later. By the book and the play, Colonel Mulberry Sellers became, at least to some, a dramatic illustration of what was afoot in that era. In March, 1875, the Chicago Times carried an entertainment notice for the opening of that play in that city. This account told that the author of the book and the playwright had envisioned Lawrence Barrett for a role in the play; but it dawned on them that someone with more of a comedic inclination would do better. Perhaps an intimation of that change of tone can be seen in a change of name. The colonel of the novel had a biblical first name, Beriah (Genesis 46–17). That colonel now became Mulberry Sellers, and a humorous actor, John T. Raymond, entered the scene for which Lawrence Barrett had been considered. As this Chicago Times writer put it, the play, with Raymond, had created a “sensation” in New York City, in a run of 120 days. Now Chicago would share the excitement.

For Massachusetts children, including those in the city of Lynn, December 8, 1908 was a date of particular importance. That day their fathers voted whether their city would accept the new state playground law. The law required cities and towns with over 10,000 residents to provide and maintain playgrounds for the “recreation and physical education of minors.” In Lynn, as in other cities, a high level of publicity surrounded the referendum. Editorials and front-page advertisements ran in the local papers, and posters hung in business windows. Even children participated. On election day, members of the Lynn Boys' Club paraded the streets wearing banners that proclaimed, “Vote for playgrounds for me.” The triumphant “yes” vote of 11,122 to 1,083 set a Lynn record for the first time the citizens had ever turned in a vote that reached five figures. By March 1909, thirty-nine Massachusetts cities and towns had held referendums; all but two agreed to impose the new law on themselves.

On Friday, April 5, 1878, Benjamin F. Butler, a Republican from Massachusetts, arose in the U.S. House of Representatives and offered a resolution stating “that the true Union, maimed soldier, Brigadier-General James Shields” be chosen as doorkeeper of that body. Although a seemingly innocuous motion, Butler's resolution would spark a debate over the election of a doorkeeper that would last into the following week. That debate — and the reactions to it — are in turn quite revealing of the political environment of the time. Specifically, the “doorkeeper controversy” of 1878 symbolizes the persistence of sectionalism in the immediate post-Reconstruction years. It also provides yet another example of the turmoil and controversy that characterized Ben Butler's colorful political career.

During gigantic urban revivals in 1875 and 1876, the Chicago-shoe-salesman-turned-religious-evangelist Dwight Lyman Moody set the northern United States ablaze with the fires of a great religious awakening. Over two million Americans of all Protestant affiliations attended his meetings in Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New York City, and Chicago. Although his popularity had been unrivalled, Moody worried about his campaign that would begin in Boston in 1877. To carry the day, he knew that he would need the help of “the New England women.” “What a power they would be,” Moody claimed. For this reason, he sought out Frances E. Willard, an up-and-coming female leader and temperance advocate. When the two met, the evangelist asked, “Will you go with me to Boston and help in the women's meetings?” After considering the invitation for several days, Willard agreed to join him. She did more than merely minister to women, however. On one occasion, as she recounted later, “Mr. Moody…placed my name upon his program” to “literally preach” to men and women. Willard wondered aloud if the sight of a woman preaching would shock the audience: “Brother Moody…, perhaps you will hinder the work among these conservatives.” Responding, Moody “laughed in his cheery way, and declared that ‘it was just what they needed.’”

“They are having a very searious [sic] riot at Homestead. There is a great many killed and wounded on both sides and it will continue until the state troops put it down.” In his diary entry from the evening of July 6, 1892, Robert Cornell recorded the news of violence that had occurred earlier that day in Homestead, a mill town six miles upriver from Pittsburgh and home to the Carnegie Steel Company's massive works. Even without the avalanche of details that would emerge throughout 1892 and 1893 in the regional and national press, Pittsburghers like Cornell placed immediate emphasis on the events at Homestead. The former coal worker offered two ways to capture the day's meaning—as a breakdown of civic order and as a tally of the damage done to bodies. By describing the clash between steelworkers and employees of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as a riot that would cease only when National Guard troops enforced order, Cornell assumed that workers had broken free of the constraints that normally held them in check. Industrial discipline, craft pride, and regular wages no longer channeled the power of Homestead's 3,800 workers into the production of steel. Instead, workers now exhibited that power on the streets through acts of violent unity. Furthermore, in noting the physical toll of the day's fighting, Cornell situated July 6, 1892 as a day of battling bodies that could be understood in terms of injury and death. Combined, Cornell's pair of explanations represented a striking interpretation of the meaning of Homestead, one that was echoed throughout the nation in the establishment press.

The struggle over censorship stood at the core of the relationship between the political culture of progressivism and early moving pictures. Called by contemporaries and historians alike a democratic art, the moving pictures invited audiences to participate in the new mass culture of the early twentieth-century. As some early film makers began to use the medium to tell stories, those sitting in small theaters in towns and cities across America saw before them a make-believe world that was nonetheless plausible commentary on the past, the present, and the future. What remained unresolved was how those who championed political reforms, ostensibly in the language of progressive and democratic politics, might harness the power of the medium in redefining American political and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. How much power the moving pictures and its mass audience might assume energized men and women, particularly progressives in New York City, who sought a more democratic culture, politics, and social life. They regarded the political potential of the moving pictures as essential to the empowerment of the masses in an age when social boundaries were in flux. At the same time, they tried and ultimately failed to extend to moving pictures the protection of the First Amendment. They did this because they believed in the political and artistic possibilities of the medium for a democratic culture. In creating a plan to elevate the moving pictures and their places of exhibition, they became locked in a confrontation with other reformers who feared the awesome power of the screen to hasten modernity and all that it implied.

When historians describe the American woman who served overseas with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) during World War I, they typically fall back on generalizations. The American women who served “over there” were white, single, well-educated, and from an urban area of the Northeast or West Coast of the United States. Most were gainfully employed before going to Europe, holding a teaching, clerical, or other position suitable for respectable white women of that period. Frequently, they were financially independent and lived on their own. While such generalizations are valuable, their obvious drawback is that they obscure the diversity of women serving in specific organizations. Also, such generalizations can prove misleading when applied to any one organization; what might be true for a YMCA worker might be false for a telephone operator.

Hindsight allows present-day scholars to view the development of academic disciplines in a light that contemporaries would never have seen. Hence, from our perspective, Mary Furner's assertion that anthropology developed as a profession reacting against biology and the physical sciences makes sense, for we tend to celebrate the triumph of cultural anthropology as the coming of age of the discipline. However, this trajectory of professional development was not a necessary or predestined development. Rather, the eventual (if occasionally still embattled) predominance of culture over the categories of race, nation, and biology was only one of many possible outcomes. This paper investigates a different trajectory, one that most current scholars would hope has been relegated to the dustbin of history. It is still a cautionary tale, though, in that while the racial anthropology followed in this narrative did not survive World War II, its practitioners did enjoy a degree of prominence and influence that was much greater and longer than has been generally acknowledged by current accounts.

In May of 1896, Richard Bartholdt, a Republican from Missouri and a German immigrant, stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and introduced a bill that would set off months of debate in the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The bill was H.R. 7864, which required all male immigrants between the ages of sixteen and sixty to prove they were literate in either English or some other language. While congressmen on all sides of the issue made passionate arguments for and against this bill, they nevertheless found some areas of agreement. The supporters and opponents of restriction all regarded southern and eastern European immigrants as racially different than those of northwestern European descent. Further, all congressmen understood the purpose of the bill to be as much about improving the United States citizenry racially as intellectually. Richard Bartholdt clearly stated the racial reasoning behind the literacy test when he introduced the bill to the House.