The man they called “Smiley” died in February 1938 on an operating table in Kingston, Jamaica. His stomach cancer, only recently discovered, was quickly deemed inoperable by a doctor in the Cayman Islands, where he lived with his pregnant wife and four children. In Cayman, there had been no public hospital. Instead, a British heiress paid to build a four-bed emergency ward and dispensary meant to serve the island's 6,500 residents. Four beds for more than six thousand. Such insufficiency represented the extent of institutionalized health care at the edge of the British Empire.

As a result of the woman suffrage movement, citizenship and voting rights, though considered separate issues by the courts, became more intertwined in the mind of the average American. This interconnectedness was also a product of the concurrent movement to disfranchise immigrant declarant voters—immigrants who had filed their intention to become citizens but had not completed the naturalization process. This essay shows how suffragists pursued immigrant declarant disfranchisement as part of the woman suffrage movement, arguing that the same competitive political conditions that encouraged politicians to enfranchise primarily white, citizen women led them to disfranchise immigrant declarants. It analyzes suffragists’ arguments at both the state and national levels that voting was a right of citizens who had met their wartime obligations to the nation, and maintains that woman suffrage and the votes of white women who supported the measures disfranchising immigrant declarants and limiting immigrant rights should be included in historians’ understanding of the immigration restrictionist and nativist movements.

Between 1870 and 1914, at least 266 Protestant ministers abandoned their posts, left their homes and families, and eloped with women who were not their wives. As critics of religion used these elopement scandals to discredit American Protestantism, those sympathetic to religion's hold on American morality attempted to dissuade the press from indulging in the sensational. Though initially hesitant to report on Protestant pastors' immoralities in this period, the press eventually came to an almost universal acceptance of scandal as a legitimate journalistic genre. As the public wondered what the proliferation of sex scandals among the Protestant elites might mean for religion in America, the press used the genre of ministerial elopement as an entrée into larger cultural debates about religion, marriage, and romantic love in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Since the colonial era, the ideological and cultural usefulness of Asia has changed with evolving American needs. This article argues that the Progressive Era turn toward the Pacific world marked a new epoch and mode of transnational interchange as a diverse array of Americans traveled to China and Japan. Encounters with Asianness in situ would lead to a reinvention of the U.S. worldview in the late nineteenth century. The question at hand for certain Americans was how to become “modern,” to germinate “seeds for a new life” that would ensure the prosperity and well-being of the United States amidst momentous global changes. Instead of being antimodernist, the fetishization of Asia served as a way to rein in and define modernity for American purposes. In the process, modernist Orientalism became a framework for imagining China and Japan and their cultural practices. Buddhism, in particular, was reconceptualized as a hybrid entity that seemed to be emblematic of the dawn of a new era. Ultimately, the flow of ideas and peoples between Asia and the United States enabled Americans to construct a global “modern” identity for themselves and to carve out a prominent role for the nation within the international community.

The map of the American petroleum industry shifted rapidly from the Northeast to the Southwest at the turn of the twentieth century when spectacular gushers were struck first in Texas and soon in California, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The flood of small and mid-size oil producers broke the hold that the Standard Oil Company had for decades held on the industry. Competition defeated monopoly. Or so the conventional story goes. This article offers a more complicated narrative by focusing on conflicts between Standard Oil and independent producers in the booming towns of southeast Kansas in 1904 and 1905. In those years, John D. Rockefeller's firm established a monopoly through technologies of distribution and distillation and the production of scientific knowledge and opaque classifications of commodities. Oil producers revolted. A reform movement turned to the rhetoric and policy ideas of Populism as it sought to use state power to challenge the stranglehold of the “octopus.” This article explores the previously unrecognized significance of this movement by showing how the Kansas oil war contributed to the breakup of Standard Oil by the Supreme Court in 1911 and constituted one of the bottom-up sources for the reconstruction of American capitalism.

From nearly the moment the woman's suffrage movement began at Seneca Falls in 1848, anti-suffragists actively campaigned against it, claiming that woman suffrage would only destroy both American politics and the American family. However, despite their best efforts, states in the American West passed equal suffrage laws. Interestingly, once it passed in their states, anti-suffragists in the American West—albeit begrudgingly—exercised their right to vote. As equal suffrage continued to expand, the Western anti-suffragist strategy became the strategy of anti-suffragists everywhere. This essay examines three states that represent pivotal moments in the development of the anti-suffrage movement: Colorado, California, and Oklahoma. Shortly after Colorado passed equal suffrage in 1893 and California passed equal suffrage in 1911, anti-suffragists organized state and national associations. By the time Oklahoma passed its equal suffrage law in 1918, anti-suffragists were not only voting—they were also willing to run for office. Anti-suffragist strategy and rhetoric relied on how suffrage worked in the West, or at least anti-suffrage perceptions of it. In other words, women's suffrage in the West served as a catalyst for the anti-suffragist movement.

This essay surveys the changes and continuities in U.S. immigration law and policy between the Gilded Age and the 1990s–2010s. It points to how the administration of immigration law today is rooted in doctrines established in late nineteenth-century immigration cases. In particular, the essay connects current anxieties over immigration, borders, and national sovereignty to the “plenary power” doctrine that came out of the Supreme Court's decision in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889). Examining recent federal actions to “secure” the border and enforce immigration law, this essay begins to address the ways in which current policy continues to reflect Gilded Age anxieties about territory, sovereignty, migration, and diverse populations during an era of constantly shifting borders.

After Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, comparing our era to the Gilded Age is no longer just a metaphor: Piketty argues that we never actually left the Gilded Age. The mid-twentieth-century period of lower inequality was a massive and perhaps unrepeatable exception to what Piketty sees as the natural tendencies toward inequality inherent in capitalist societies. But comparing our current period of relentless cuts in taxes and rising inequality to the Gilded Age shows why our period cannot be a repeat of the Gilded Age: the Gilded Age itself led to so many transformations to capitalism that inequality no longer leads to the political outrage that could anchor a broad-based progressive movement. The Gilded Age led to policies that made capitalism bearable, and that is precisely what is leading now to a situation in which Americans identify their success with the free market, and resist policies to lower inequality.

This essay explores the life experiences that shaped the political work of Lucretia del Valle Grady. Born in California at the turn of the twentieth century, del Valle Grady traced her lineage to early California Spanish-Mexican settlers. She came of age in the emerging metropolis of Los Angeles and closely witnessed her father's, Reginaldo del Valle, own political career evolve. After a successful acting career, Lucretia left Los Angeles to study in New York and took part in suffrage efforts. While suffrage occupies a center role in understanding women's political work, this essay shows that suffrage functioned as a stepping stone between formidable political experiences. By decentering suffrage, this profile traces the vast scope of del Valle Grady's life of political engagement.

Charles A. Beard's trajectory as a political scientist and expert on municipal government has not yet been fully examined. Based on a close analysis of his teaching at Columbia University and his contributions to city government in New York and Tokyo, this article outlines the development of Beard's vision of American democracy. It argues that, unlike most progressives, Beard refrained from endorsing direct democracy measures as a blueprint for reform, focusing instead on streamlining the American system of government to incorporate, in a transparent fashion, both political parties and interest groups. This article showcases Beard's conception of politics and explains how pluralism and functionalism underpinned his proposals for efficient government.

Both white and Chinese American suffragists in the United States closely watched and discussed the events of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and the establishment of the Chinese Republic (1912–1949). They were aware of the republican revolutionaries’ support for women's rights, which conflicted with American stereotypes of China as a backward nation, especially in its treatment of women. Chinese suffragists, real and imagined, became a major talking point in debates over women's voting rights in the United States as white suffragists and national newspapers championed their stories. This led to prominent visual depictions of Chinese suffragists in the press, but also their participation in public events such as suffrage parades. For a brief time, the transnational nature of suffrage conversations was highly visible as was the suffrage activism of women in U.S. Chinese communities. However, because Chinese immigrants were barred from citizenship by U.S. immigration law, white activists tended to depict Chinese suffragists as foreign, resulting in the erasure of their memory in the U.S. suffrage movement.

One striking parallel between the Gilded Age and today is the return of the “ring” as a volatile form of governance. Rings are small bands of entrepreneurs who, through capture of key political institutions, exploit the coalition-building imperatives of party politics to rapidly accumulate large personal fortunes. The vernacular hails from the 1860s and 1870s, when the Tweed Ring, Gold Ring, Whiskey Ring, and Bank Ring, among others, scandalized the public with smash and grab practices. In the Trump era, Paul Manafort's career and the president's family business share many similarities to these classic episodes, both in the contested origin of private wealth and the circulation of profits throughout the political system. Rings thus have a tendency to recur in American political development. When electoral politics becomes financialized, speculators may seize opportunities to extract a hefty surplus from the public domain. In premodern contexts, Max Weber called this plundering phenomenon “booty capitalism.” The variant specific to American electoral institutions highlights a periodic conflict in democratic capitalism that arises over the legitimacy of political wealth accumulation.

The moniker “Gilded Age” invokes questions of wealth, class, and political economy. When paired with a subsequent “Progressive Era,” as in the name of this journal and the society that sponsors it, the implication is that economic developments after the Civil War gave rise to pressing questions of workplace safety, income distribution, monopoly, and the like, which reform and protest movements rightly sought to rectify. Whether to invoke the Gilded Age to describe the current era of U.S. history also centers on such questions: it makes sense to say that we are living in a Second Gilded Age, Thomas Piketty and others have argued, because inequalities of wealth and the rise of corporate power echo those of the 1880s and 1890s; or, respond skeptics like Heath Carter, it is not a helpful comparison because the cultural and organizational forces contesting inequality are so much weaker now.

For many us who have studied, researched, written, and taught about the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, the current period of the global viral pandemic is eerily and unpleasantly familiar. Today, the rapid global spread of a virus has prompted policies calling for widespread closures, social distancing, constant handwashing, and public mask wearing in additional to other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). We have also seen pushback and resistance to these directives as well as substantial mismanagement of resources and a flood of misinformation. Much health policy has been inconsistently set at the local rather than federal level. These responses to our current pandemic closely mirror those to the pandemic 102 years ago.