Of all the figures in the struggle over turn-of-the-century vice reform, Anthony Comstock is perhaps the last one might expect to encounter immortalized in the nude. He acquired his fame as a censor of nudity, among other offenses: from 1873 to his death in 1915, Assistant United States Postmaster Comstock lent his name and his enthusiasm for law enforcement to the prosecution of the “Comstock Laws,” the eponymous statutes which restricted the dissemination of vicious images and information through the United States mail. In his government post and as the head of New York City's private Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock prosecuted quack physicians, abortionists, lottery runners, purveyors of lewd literature and art, free love advocates and physical culture devotees. By the end of his career, he had arrested more than 3,700 people and burned over fifty tons of obscene books, 3,984,063 obscene pictures, and 16,900 photographic plates.

For a variety of reasons, the study and teaching of both United States history in general and the history of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in particular should be thriving in Canada more than in other nations. Geographic proximity and shared language would advance this probability, even if the pervasive presence of American mass media did not. For students in Canadian colleges and universities, a combination of exposure to American doings through television and little prior academic opportunity to explore the history of the United States often whets an appetite for study at the post-secondary level. Interest in the GAPE arises — if for no other reason — from the fact that during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, both Canadians and Americans witnessed the emergence of corporate capitalism as a, perhaps the, principal shaper of their societies. At the last count in December 2001, Canada contained the largest concentration of H-SHGAPE subscribers outside the United States (25).

For much of the twentieth century, scholars treated the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era as starkly contrasting phases in the unfolding of the American story: the post-Civil War dark ages followed by the bright light of the early twentieth century. More recently, historians have recognized the oversimplification if not downright wrongheadedness of that dichotomy. The past few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a variety of topics with coverage dates roughly from the 1870s to the 1920s. Most of these newer works underscore the continuities between the two periods and the relatively seamless evolution of forces and institutions.

Just after midnight on 17 January 1900, a special train pulled out of Chicago carrying a contingent of public officials on a secret mission to Lockport, about 30 miles to the southwest along the Des Plaines and Illinois River Valleys. They were racing to beat an injunction that was expected to be issued later that day by the United States Supreme Court. The managers of the Sanitary District of Chicago (SDC) were headed for a dam that controlled the water level in a brand new, 30-mile ship canal and drainage channel. Touted as the world's largest earth-moving project, the $33, 000, 000 waterway promised not only to solve the city's sanitation problems but also to boost its economy as the centerpiece of a grand, deep-water highway from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. Reaching their destination before noon, they ordered the dam's “bear trap” doors lowered, sending a rush of water down the Illinois River. The opening of the canal was so hurried that unfinished construction projects five miles downstream at Joliet were swept away in the ensuing flood, creating a sudden danger of inundating the city.

Thanks to Richard Jensen, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Alan Lessoff and William G. Shade for helpful comments on this essay.

Comparative perspectives on the United States have received increased attention in recent years, stimulated apparently by the rise in world history's popularity. David Thelen's sponsorship of transnational history as a subject of three special issues of the Journal of American History no doubt has contributed to the trend. The reprinting of C. Vann Woodward's The Comparative Approach to American History in 1997, the publication of George Fredrickson's essays on comparative history, and the report of the La Pietra Project reflect recent efforts to put United States history in an international perspective. While comparative history hardly has gained equal footing with nationally-centered studies, enough work on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has appeared over the last decade and a half to warrant an assessment. This essay takes note of scholarship on economics, business, politics and governance that has examined the United States within an international context during the 1870s–1914 era. My objective is to discern trends in the literature and suggest opportunities for future research rather than to provide a comprehensive bibliographical survey.

In the courses on U.S. history I teach in Mexico, this speech by Maine congressman Severance serves well to illustrate arguments of the opposition movement to the U.S.-Mexican War. Severance offers a variety of reasons for his anti-war stand, but to my students I like to emphasize this particular one, for it follows a logic contrary to their nationally-framed perceptions. What Severance suggests here, is that these two countries share a common identity, namely that of being “the two largest republics of the world” based on “the principles of civil liberty and elective government,” and that therefore they ought not to be at war. My insistence on a perspective that views the commonalities of the two countries' historic experiences has been futile, however, when teaching about a war that resulted in the “transfer” - to put it in neutral terms - of over half of Mexico's national territory to the U.S. Students are little impressed by this congressman's (and my own) argumentation and stress instead what divides Mexico and the U.S., not only with regard to this historical event, but also with regard to the countries' pasts as a whole. For instance, in a conference at a university in Toluca, my efforts to make my audience understand the internal dynamics of U.S. foreign policy during the 19th century not only appeared to fall on deaf ears but also provoked nearly hostile reactions.

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward sought to understand the social consequences of industrialization by looking at a city. One of the Gilded Age's best-selling books, the Utopian novel magically transported lead character Julian West to a futuristic Boston set in the year 2000 and contrasted that ideal, cooperative world with the harsh reality of individualism-drenched, industrial Boston in 1887. Bellamy's vision of a twenty-first-century city was prescient about technology: it included automation, mass communication, and swift transportation. His social predictions proved less successful. Boston in the year 2000 was populated by Victorian ladies and gentlemen and lacked the cultural variety we associate with contemporary city life.

Images of Turkey in the United States during the Gilded Age were generally not flattering. For the most part, Turks appeared in Gilded Age serious journals and popular press as “blood-thirsty,” “savages,” and “the most brutal outcasts of the human race,” who were merely “camping in Europe” – albeit for five hundred years – but not a part of it. A “pitiable imbecility” was said to characterize the Ottoman Empire, with the Turks having shown an “utter incapacity for just, enlightened, progressive government.” Looking at Turkey in 1877, an American army officer concluded that in order “to reform Turkey” it would be necessary first “to abolish the Turks.” At the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, according to historians Gail Bederman and Robert Rydell, the location of the Turkish village on the Midway clearly placed Turkey among the “barbarous” nations of the world; at the Turkish village, as Bederman puts it, “unmanly, dark-skinned men cajoled customers to shed their manly restraint and savor their countrywomen's sensuous dancing.” Even Mark Twain quipped that “I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little – not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.”