I would like to thank Rebecca Edwards and James L. Huston for their thoughtful and challenging responses to my essay. Both these authors have thought deeply about periodization and synthesis, and for that reason it occurred to me to allow their responses to stand alone and go unanswered. But in the interests of sparking further discussion I would like to offer a few clarifications and additional thoughts with regard to periodization. Due to considerations of space I will not try to answer all the reservations and criticisms expressed and alternative views advanced but will focus only on a few points that bear on the thrust of my essay.

For all its typically Progressive Era characteristics and national scope, the “honest weight movement” has long been hidden in plain sight. Seemingly ubiquitous and mundane, the common grocery scale was the intersecting borderland of industry, government, marketplace, and consumer. On the one hand, the regulation of weights and measures, being one of the first forms of governmental regulation of the marketplace dating back to the ancient world, seems so unobjectionable and commonplace that the Progressive Era movement for its more rigorous and efficient administration does not seem like it could have been a very controversial proposal. Who, after all, could object to clear and consistent standards of measurement and their universal application? Thus, the appearance of a movement to reform the ubiquitous and the mundane has not elicited the same historical attention that novel forms of government regulation have.