There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.

In the 1970s and 1980s some of the most exciting work in legal history challenged late-nineteenth-century law as following a false formalism, only pretending to reason from abstract principles isolated from life's realities. Others took a different view, but these scholars insisted that law should be seen as political or economically determined rather than emerging from principle. Law was no more than a system of argumentative exchange. “Of dialectics there is no end,” one observed. In this view, principled law served only as a cover for economic avarice and political strength. If law merely reflects power, then there is really little reason for historians to study law or constitutionalism, and the recent migration of the historical study of constitutionalism, away from history departments and into law schools is well placed.

My title is a gloss from Everett Dirksen, the long-time, now-deceased U.S. senator from Illinois who encouraged his party “to get right with Abraham Lincoln.” As Republicans drifted away from acknowledging their partisan connection to the sixteenth president, Dirksen appreciated how Lincoln could serve as an invigorating, unifying theme for Republicans in the post-Civil Rights Era. The analogy, of course, is that suffrage history has been similarly marginalized, submerged even within the limited space given to women's history by attention to Progressive Era associations and service groups such as the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the PTA, women's literary clubs, as well as the settlement house movement and the Women's National Republican Club.

The contemporary politicization of sexualities has deep roots in the previous fin de siècle. Then as now, conflicts over sex acts and sexual identities were central points of articulation in a wide-ranging struggle over just how to produce, reproduce, and embody a moral and humane society. Like scholars of other western, industrialized nations, historians of the United States have identified the turn of the twentieth century as an important period of change in sexual ideology and practice. For decades, the chief framework for understanding this watershed has been a transition from “Victorian” to “modern” mores. One of the most sophisticated renderings of this transition appears in John D'Emilio and Estelle Freedman's Intimate Matters, a comprehensive survey of U.S. sexual history. The authors identify a shift from family- and reproduction-oriented sexual practices to “sexual liberalism,” the idea that sexual preferences and pleasures stand at the center of individual selfhood.

During the 1880s Irish terrorism posed significant difficulties for American international relations. State Department officials at home and abroad monitored and assessed the activities and ideologies of many radical groups throughout Europe, but few were more burdensome and frustrating than Irish-American dynamiters. Recurrent threats to life and property in the United Kingdom and allegations of ties to American institutions and citizens eventually prompted American diplomats to articulate an aversion to terrorism. State Department officials also faulted the British colonial system for creating an environment that nurtured violent resistance and for using counter-terrorist measures believed to be repressive and largely ineffective. The diplomatic complications created by Irish nationalists eventually gave way to a mutual Anglo-American ideological repulsion to terrorism.

I wish to thank the editors of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for giving me a chance to react to Richard Schneirov's engaging article on periodizing the Gilded Age. I tend to agree with his generalizations and approach to the subject, having only some small qualifications to offer, largely concerning the quest for periodization, the timing of the break from one type of society to another, and the role of the Civil War. It seems that modern historians have revised somewhat the comment of George III to Edward Gibbons, “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbons?” Now it has become, “Quibble, quibble, quibble, eh, Mr. Historian?” Well, such seems to be our fate. However, on one interpretation there is no quibbling at all: somewhere in the years called the Gilded Age came the mightiest transition that the society of the United States has ever experienced. The quote in the title of this short piece attests to the realization that such was the case: it is from the Brahmin historian, James Ford Rhodes writing about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877: “For we had hugged the delusion that such social uprisings belonged to Europe and had no reason of being in a free republic where there was plenty of room and an equal chance for all.” The political economy inherited from the Revolution had failed, and it was beginning to be recognized that a new political economy was emerging.

This story of Dewey's disciples in the New South presents two major themes rarely seen in current literature about the South or about the Progressive Era: the influence of educational philosopher John Dewey in the region and the struggles of his disciples—the southern women educators who were major influential forces in reshaping the area's educational systems. These themes come together to produce an unusual and instructive story about these female leaders of southern educational reform during the Progressive Era. In an attempt to correct what educational historian Clarence Karier calls an “inexcusable omission,” this paper showcases two women who were not silenced during their leadership tenure but have since become so, by time and by the masculine interpretation of educational history.

In 1884, a twenty-five-year-old Theodore Roosevelt attended the Republican National Convention in Chicago as a delegate-at-large from New York. There, he and his new friend, Massachusetts delegate Henry Cabot Lodge, backed George Edmunds of Vermont against their party's overwhelming choice, the “Plumed Knight,” James G. Blaine. Despite their energetic efforts, which received national attention, Blaine easily secured the nomination, and both Lodge and Roosevelt eventually backed the party's choice. For Lodge biographers, the Chicago convention represented Lodge's “personal Rubicon,” the “turning point” of his career, leading to “the greatest crisis of Lodge's political life.” Roosevelt historians also see the convention as “one of the crucial events of Theodore's life,” “the great and deciding moment of TR's life,” leading to “the most agonizing dilemma of his political career.” The usual story of the convention is that by backing Blaine against the wishes of other Independent Republicans, both Lodge and Roosevelt did great damage to their immediate careers by alienating their natural allies. This led to Lodge losing his race for Congress that same fall and to Roosevelt fleeing west to his Dakota ranch with his political future uncertain. Moreover, Roosevelt's decision is often depicted as the moment he became a professional politician. David McCullough writes that the convention “marked the point at which he chose—had to choose—whether to cross the line and become a party man, a professional politician,” while John Morton Blum asserts that by campaigning for Blaine, “Roosevelt declared not only for Blaine but also for professionalism.”

In 1907 the New York Court of Appeals considered a bindery company's challenge to a night work law passed by New York's legislature in 1898 and amended in 1903. The statute stated that “no female shall be employed, permitted, or suffered to work in any factory in this state before six o'clock in the morning, or after nine o'clock in the evening of any day.” The outcome of the case was preordained, for New York's highest court was famous for advocating the legal “freedom of contract” principle, which negated state efforts to limit workers' hours. From 1878 through 1904 the Court of Appeals had held that any restriction on laborers' hours was unconstitutional. The only exception, Lochner v. New York, had been reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on appeal.

People in the United States and other countries, if they know anything about Woodrow Wilson, identify this American president with the League of Nations. They regard his role in its creation as his major contribution to world history. Beyond this general consensus, however, there is considerable disagreement.

Something was menacing the South during the Progressive Era. Southern physicians located the threat in the “germ plasm,” the genes, of the region's inhabitants. Writing in a now-infamous 1893 “open letter” published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for “some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the negro of the present day.” McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of “[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our negroes.” Lydston's solution to this problem was not lynching, but surgical castration which “prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind.” Eight years later in Alabama, Dr. John E. Purdon opined, “It is a proved fact of experience that the inveterate criminal tends to propagates a race of criminals, and that the undeveloped or degraded nerve-tissue will duplicate itself in the next generation.” Dr. Purdon then declared, “Emasculation is the simplest and most perfect plan that can be adopted to secure the perfection of the race.” Twenty-three years later, in 1924, Harry Hamilton Laughlin testified in support of a Virginia law providing for the eugenic sterilization of the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South,” who allegedly created social problems for “normal” people. The multiplication of these “defective delinquents,” Laughlin and Virginia officials claimed, could only be controlled by restricting their procreation.

Richard Schneirov's call for rethinking the post-Reconstruction era is long overdue and most welcome. For reasons he lays out with admirable clarity and insight, recent approaches have not offered a satisfactory synthesis. A new narrative offers considerable benefits to historians of the era and the broader publics we serve.