This essay, based on the 2025 SHGAPE Presidential Address, considers the late nineteenth-century phenomenon of “baby murderers.” It examines the dilemmas that newspaper reporters, local authorities, medical experts, and ordinary citizens confronted as they wrestled with the problem of young children who killed. How could one distinguish an accident from an intentional act? At what ages did children understand the consequences of their actions? When were they old enough to grasp the finality of death? Could murderous tendencies be nipped in the bud? Were homicidal impulses inherited, the result of deficient parenting, or the fault of a corrupt environment? Were baby murderers mentally ill, morally deficient, or just plain evil? Did the law sufficiently deter perpetrators and protect potential victims? These questions acquired special resonance in the late nineteenth century, a time that preceded the establishment of separate juvenile justice systems but one in which the right to a protected childhood had gained increasing (but by no means universal) acceptance. The Gilded Age, then, offers a particularly rich vantage point from which to view how various popular definitions of childhood intersected and clashed with medical understandings and legal procedures.

“The Other Kitchen Debate” places the history of the microwave oven in the context of Cold War anxieties and gender politics. Discrepancies between Soviet and U.S. safety standards, Soviet deployment of microwave espionage, and the prospect of nuclear war triggered fears about the possible dangers of kitchen appliances powered by low-level radiation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, politicians, government regulators, industry representatives, advertisers, home economists, media, and consumers engaged in lively debates over oven safety and the merits of microwave cookery. By the late eighties and early nineties, as East–West tensions waned and record numbers of American women entered the paid labor force, American media perceived fewer distinctions between the hazards posed by electronic ovens and those presented by their conventional counterparts. New definitions of safety redefined microwave ovens as purely domestic appliances, leaving questions about the potential risks of nonionizing radiation unresolved.

This essay explores the story of Nancy Clem, an outwardly respectable Indianapolis confidence woman and alleged murderess, in the context of changing constructions of class, gender, and criminality. It examines various ways in which lawyers, newspaper reporters, and ordinary citizens struggled to understand a woman who did not fit preexisting conceptions of gender and crime. A series of high-profile cases involving bourgeois criminals and (more than likely) Clem's own social aspirations allowed cultural commentators to portray her as a “genteel murderess.” Upon her release from prison after an abortive fifth trial, Clem could not sustain her newly acquired social identity, in part because her erstwhile refinement was a journalistic creation and in part because the changing nature of class, gender, and space in Gilded Age Indianapolis provided her with fewer opportunities for self-fashioning. Clem's social odyssey from half-literate “Butternut” to genteel murderess to uncultured “capitalist” reflects slippery, yet significant, transitions between social fluidity and relative rigidity, antebellum respectability and Gilded Age gentility.

Readers who perused a 1904 issue of the Atlantic Monthly encountered an article with the intriguing title of “The Small Business as a School of Manhood.” Largely a diatribe against the growing dominance of large corporations, it lamented the presumably inevitable passing of smaller concerns. Curiously, its author, Henry A. Stimson, placed relatively little emphasis on the economic or even the political consequences of this development. Rather, he worried that the new order, which reduced would-be entrepreneurs to the status of corporate employees, represented “the loss of something fine in manhood.” Men who inhabited the newly-created ranks of middle and upper management might lead prosperous lives but faced the loss of their selfrespect, their dignity, their “intellectual stamina.” As Stimson saw it, they had been emasculated by the rise of the corporation.