The nineteenth century was an era of perceptual certitude. Scientists collected and cataloged, explorers mapped and charted, artists rendered what they observed. The empirical approach to perception was grounded in the ideas that God had created an orderly and rational world and that the senses connected people to the intrinsic meanings of the things they contacted and observed. But by the 1890s, uncertainty about the reality of what people perceived was beginning to transform American popular culture. Among other things, the acceptance of perception as relative transformed attitudes to erotic displays and provided a foundation for the modernization of sexual attitudes. Anna Held was a prominent performer whose sexual play excited and challenged Progressive Era audiences. The public's response to her sexuality reveals the depth of the doubt that the questioning of Victorian certitude created. The progressive impulse, which sought to reaffirm certainty with regard to sexual identities and behaviors, can be seen as a reaction to the doubts that cultural modernists embraced and Anna Held's public enjoyed.

“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 story of the Great Southwest strike, a textbook example of the upheavals of 1886, has long been told as an epic battle between railway millionaire Jay Gould, national Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly, and Martin Irons, with many historians and contemporaries casting strike leader Irons as the epitome of impatient, romantic, and even deluded labor activism. District Assembly 101's call to walk out on Gould's southwestern system of roads was, arguably, strategically ill-advised. It vastly overestimated the Knights' power in the wake of two victories against Gould in 1885 and certainly ignored the district's lack of funds, lax support among skilled trainmen, and the terms of an historic agreement between the national Knights and Gould. A closer look at Irons's life and leadership, however, reveals a more complicated explanation of the strike and takes into fuller account the experiences and perceptions of striking railroaders. This essay holds that events on the ground, combined with the heady context of the Great Upheaval, influenced Irons and his supporters' decisions to strike, to expand the effort, and to defend it with violence. The ensuing attacks on Irons stemmed partly from his unstable personal history but largely from the broader social anxieties that the conflict had exposed.

Atheists are not the first group that comes to mind when one commonly thinks of late nineteenth-century southern Appalachia. Richard Lynch Garner (1848–1920), a self-taught scientist from southwestern Virginia who moved to southern Gabon in 1892, sought to bind together conventional southern middle-class views on race and manhood with religious skepticism. Studies of unbelief in the United States have almost entirely ignored the South as well as the ways that freethinkers engaged with race, thereby leaving out men like Garner. Though Garner drew on northern and midwestern freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll for critiques of Christianity, he also saw himself as a defender of paternal southern views of race from northerners and from Christian missionaries. Still, he distanced himself from other southern agnostics, especially the race-baiting William Cowper Brann, by presenting himself as a fatherly protector of Africans and African Americans. Garner used his observations on Gabonese societies to critique colonialism and missionary work as denials of biological differences between the races. Interestingly, Garner contended that Gabonese spirituality was materialist and lacked a notion of divinity. Ultimately, Garner downplayed his freethinking and his anti-colonialism in his published work—probably to ensure his ability to continue his research in colonial Africa and perhaps to better market himself in the United States.

This paper explores the role of race in the construction of tribal rolls for the Choctaw Nation of Indian Territory under the Dawes Act. Examination of two examples, enrollment of Choctaws in Mississippi and arguments presented in the 1907 hearings before the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs on the status of Choctaws of Indian and African American heritage, demonstrates that policymakers' primary concern in deciding the fate of mixedrace individuals was not the determination of Indian blood, so as to enroll them, but of African American blood, so as to exclude them. With this approach, members of the Dawes Commission used Indian policy to uphold the color line. The Choctaw Nation also drew sharp racial lines. Their concern, however, was not racial purity, but citizenship and tribal sovereignty. Attorneys for the mixed-blood claimants proffered a definition which they believed to be biological—they focused on their clients' percentage of Indian blood—while the Choctaw Nation's lawyers held to a political and legal definition embedded in notions of children's legitimacy, as granted through marriages sanctioned by the Choctaw state. Thus the same racial enrollment policy—exclusion of blacks—served two different functions in the implementation of allotment.

Historians and social scientists have for years identified the current era as a new capital-dominant Gilded Age on the basis of economic trends (particularly rising inequality, now at a higher peak than in the early twentieth century), the coalescence of political elites (this time on a neoliberal, rather than protectionist agenda), and speculations about political upheaval on the horizon.

In 1891, a moral reformer named Alzire Chevaillier launched an aggressive crusade to destroy Fountaingrove, a spiritualist utopian colony in Northern California with white and Japanese members. Chevaillier accused the colony's leader, Thomas Lake Harris, of promoting “disorderly doctrines” with sexual practices “worse than those of Mormonism.” This essay uses the little-known Fountaingrove scandal to examine the interrelationship of religion, race, and sexuality in California. As a mixed-race new religious movement accused of sexual immorality, Fountaingrove transgressed prevailing norms in multiple ways. The colony became Orientalized in the public imagination, showing how new religions and non-normative sexual practices were coded as racially other. Yet media representations of Fountaingrove reflected more than straightforward “yellow peril.” The Japanese members of Fountaingrove inhabited several unstable categories at once, viewed as neither “heathen” nor Christian, neither adults nor children, neither white nor Chinese, shedding light on the uncertain religio-racial status of early Japanese immigrants to the United States. The scandal also reveals the racist dimensions of white female reformers' attacks on male dominance. The wide range of public response to Chevaillier's campaign, from moral disgust to amusement to apathy, gives evidence of the cultural fissures beginning to break open in fin de siècle America.

U.S. opinion of the Second Boer War (1899–1902) was highly divided. The debate over the war served as a proxy for fights over domestic issues of immigration, inequality, and race. Anglo-American Republicans’ support for the British was undergirded by belief in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. Caucasian but non-Anglo Democrats and Populists disputed the Anglo-Saxonist assumptions and explicitly equated the plight of the Boers to the racial and economic inequalities they faced in the United States. They utilized Anglophobia, republican ideology, and anti-modernist jeremiads to discredit their opponents and to elevate an alternative racial fiction: universal whiteness. Reports written by the celebrity journalist Richard Harding Davis while covering the Boer War, along with a wide array of other sources, illustrate the discursive underpinning of the debate. They also suggest the effectiveness of the pro-Boer argument in reshaping the racial opinions of some Anglo-Saxon elites. Although Davis arrived in South Africa a staunch supporter of transatlantic Anglo-Saxonism, he came to link the Boers with the republican values and frontier heritage associated with the U.S.’ own history. The equation of the South African Republic's resistance against the British Empire with that of the U.S.’ own war of independence highlighted contradictions between Anglo-Saxonism and American exceptionalism. As a result, Anglo-Saxonism was weakened. Davis and others increasingly embraced a notion of racial identity focused on color. Thus, public reaction to the Boer War contributed to the ongoing rise of a new wave of herrenvolk democratic beliefs centered on a vision of white racial hybridity across the social and political divisions separating Americans of European descent.

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

Civilian societies advocating a bold defense program were arguably the most visible manifestation of the American preparedness campaign in World War I. Though historians have acknowledged the significance of the broader preparedness movement in a number of studies, they have often marginalized its civilian branch in general and defense societies in particular. This article examines the structures, activities, and objectives of two major organizations active in the movement in order to challenge historiography's traditional view on preparedness. Exploring the key role of the National Security League and the American Defense Society between 1914 and 1920, the article presents two main arguments: First, civilian societies were not merely the appendix to a centralized campaign dominated by military professionals and politicians associated with the defense cause but acted as principal agents of preparedness. Second, the historiographic time frame of preparedness cannot be limited chronologically to America's years of neutrality but must include the period after April 1917.

In late 1902, exhaustion, financial distress, and the desire for a political appointment—combined with aspirations to serve as a broker for the export of African American labor abroad—led famed African American journalist T. Thomas Fortune to secure a temporary appointment with the Roosevelt administration to investigate trade and labor in Hawaii and the Philippines. In Hawaii, Fortune was fêted by the planter class, and allied himself publicly with the educational and political philosophies of Booker T. Washington. His hopes for black emigration and land ownership, however, were vigorously opposed by most newspapers connected to the oligarchy. Hawaii's robust in-language indigenous and ethnic newspapers, meanwhile, voiced their own position on black labor. In Manila, a fiercely entrepreneurial and militaristic American press attacked Fortune. Recent scholarship ties Washington's Tuskegee Institute to a kind of “Jim Crow colonialism” abroad. An in-depth look at Fortune's journey both supports and troubles such a view. Both men hoped U.S. “expansion,” and African American participation in it, might expose not only the power of race, but also its instability and vulnerability; Fortune, in particular, saw newspapers as vital to this task.

One hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into the First World War. Four days earlier, in his war message to Congress, he gave his rationale for declaring war against Imperial Germany and for creating a new world order. He now viewed German submarine attacks against neutral as well as belligerent shipping as a threat to the whole world, not just the United States. “The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind,” he claimed. “It is a war against all nations.” He now believed that Germany had violated the moral standards that “citizens of civilized states” should uphold. The president explained: “We are at the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized states.” He focused on protecting democracy against the German regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II. “A steadfast concert for peace,” he said, “can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants.” Wilson called on Congress to vote for war not just because Imperial Germany had sunk three American ships, but for the larger purpose of a new world order. He affirmed: “We are glad, now that we see the facts with no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundation of political liberty.”

In the early twentieth century, new forms of commercial entertainment—dance halls, movie theaters, amusement halls and parks, saloons and the like—emerged in urban areas, providing new ways for young Americans to amuse themselves. This essay explores the distinctive Mormon response to these new forms of amusement. Mormon leaders took up other progressive reformers’ concerns about early twentieth-century amusements, but refracted them through a distinctively Mormon lens that was at once gendered and uniquely religious. Mormons rejected the progressive double standard that sought to constrain women's, more than men's, participation in these new entertainments, focusing on restraining both genders equally. While many progressives held women more responsible for the sexual transgressions they worried resulted from these new forms of entertainment, Mormons held men and women equally accountable. Moreover, while other progressives sought (and largely failed) to provide alternative, more wholesome, entertainment for American youth, Mormons successfully provided family and Church amusements that kept their youth safely ensconced within the Church community. By the end of the 1910s, Church leaders had officially institutionalized the provision of amusement for its members and the Church formally became a social as well as religious organization.

With the current bountiful crops of outrages, provocations, and howlings, there is a temptation to evaluate everything in terms of our own Gilded Moment. The temptation needs to be resisted. Our Gilded Moment might be Trumpian, but it draws its fuel from a rebellion against a much lengthier and more complicated era that began in the late 1970s and runs into the present. Asking whether this era is a Second Gilded Age comparable to the First Gilded Age, which began at the end of the Civil War and extended into the early twentieth century, creates a blind man and the elephant problem. Examining different parts of the era can yield disparate conclusions. My task is to comprehend each era as a whole; I think that there are structural similarities stronger than particular differences.

During the decades around 1900, changing intellectual currents and the creation of the research university led American colleges and universities to alter the role of religion in students' education. Simultaneously, women matriculated in large numbers for the first time, forcing individual institutions to ask whether and how to incorporate them. Using the lens of all-male Princeton University, this article explores how these two trends combined to help instill gender ideals in the Progressive Era male elite. Princeton sought to attract an elite constituency by no longer seeking to inculcate in students simply moral excellence in general, but rather traits associated with prominent men specifically. Princeton's leaders reinforced this gendered moral formation as they shifted from evangelical spirituality focused on relating rightly to God to modernist spirituality focused on relating rightly to the human community. That students embraced these changes suggests that a new approach to moral formation at prominent men's colleges—and coeducational universities that copied their approach—may help explain why, in an era when women could first access an education equal to men's, educated men nevertheless continued to see themselves as uniquely suited for certain public leadership roles by virtue of their sex.

Double-voiced singing was a popular form of variety show entertainment from the 1860s through to the 1920s. Double-voiced performers were able, through intonation and tone, to sound as though they had at least two separate and distinct “voices,” generally one soprano and one baritone. But as Claire Rochester, a double-voiced singer of the early twentieth century made clear, their act was more than just a matter of a woman singing low notes or a man singing high ones; it was all about a performer adopting the “voice” of the other sex. The unusual practice of these singers was to sing duets (and sometimes as much as quartets) to themselves and by themselves, flipping back and forth between their male to female “voices.” I place this strange form of entertainment in the context of changing attitudes to gender and sexuality and suggests that conventional interpretations of “freak” performances as “transgressive” fail to account for these vocal wonders. Double-voiced singers shunned the “transgressive” billing, especially when their own sexual identity was called into question. In making this argument, I suggest that we need to widen our understanding of “freakery,” imposture and the meaning of “nature” and “truth,” as they were revealed both on stage and off.

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.

If for Russell Johnson the experience of teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey was that of being in a “not so strange land,” my four months as a Fulbright professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt were often quite the opposite. There I was truly a stranger in a strange land. But it is important to note right from the start that by strange I mean foreign in the sense that American history of any sort is not part of the Egyptian university curriculum. So much so that before I arrived in Egypt I had been given only a hazy idea of what I might be teaching. Once there I quickly found that I had to jettison the proposal that I had submitted for the Fulbright competition – to teach about the processes and ideas of democracy in U.S. history, most especially in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The reasons for my inability to teach what I had proposed help explain much about the place of U.S. history, indeed all of “western” history, in Egyptian universities, and how the situation differs enormously from those described for Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In these “post-eleventh September” days, it seems to me especially important to understand that while in the U.S. we seek to expand our university history curricula into a world vision, in Egypt exactly the opposite has been happening. Why this should be so in the age of globalization, and what lessons it has for U.S. historians, I think are among the valuable insights that can be gained from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in the Arab world.