In response to an enormous growth of trusts in the late nineteenth century, demands for reform among a wide spectrum of interest groups culminated in the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1915. Playing an influential, though little-recognized role in framing this legislation was Wisconsin progressive Democrat Joseph E. Davies. As Commissioner of Corporations, Davies served in a unique, dual capacity as both politician and regulator, giving him access to President Woodrow Wilson and influence on the antitrust legislation. Davies used his position to promote a vision of administrative regulation based on the nationally recognized “Wisconsin Idea.” In so doing, he intensified conflicts among Wilson's policy advisers that, in turn, had a critical impact on the antitrust legislation and on the potential effectiveness of the first commission. In the long run, however, Davies' approach to regulatory policy, based on the Wisconsin Idea, would become standard operating procedure for successful regulatory commissions of the twentieth century.

Digitized texts open new methodologies for explorations of the history of ideas. This paper locates the invention of the term “Little Italy” in New York in the 1880s and explores its rapid spread through print and popular culture from police reporting to fictional portraits of slumming and then into adolescent dime novels and early film representations. New Yorkers invented “Little Italy” but they long disagreed with urban tourists about its exact location. Still, from the moment of its origin, both visitors and natives of New York associated Little Italy with entertainment, spectacle, and the search for “safe danger.” While the location of Little Italy changed over time, such associations with pleasure and crime have persisted, even as the neighborhood emptied of its immigrant residents.

When we attend academic history conferences, it has become common to hold sessions honoring important books of the moment. This makes considerable sense, as authors get to engage with thoughtful critics in a process that, we hope, advances the discipline.

What, then, might be the point of holding a session in honor of a book published long ago—indeed, one as ancient as fifty years old? The minimalist reason might be that we are historians, and so we naturally look to the past for interest and inspiration. That would make sense, except that historians, ironically more than scholars in related disciplines, tend to cannibalize their predecessors. Sociologists, of course, still actively engage Weber, Durkheim and Marx, and even—looking to the American midcentury— Richard Hofstadter's Columbia University colleagues, C. Wright Mills and Robert Merton.

A grand man-on-horseback statue of Theodore Roosevelt stands guard at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Its heroic magnitude should remind historians that cinematic stories about masterful men possessing larger-than-life powers compete quite well in the marketplace of ideas with interpretations that show “great” men as vulnerable and fallible. How could historians ever expect to win popular audiences from the latest opiate of the reading people, books about the dash and drama of great men? Men who dare to perform bold deeds appeal to much larger audiences than most other topics historians consider historically significant. Celebrationist history wins applause; long footnotes do not. In public squares across the globe, the man-on-horseback type evokes nationalism inspired by battles won. People in other countries also lie to themselves about their pasts. Why should it be different here?

Beginning in the 1890s, the nature study movement advocated direct contact with the natural world to develop in children an appreciation for natural history, the beginnings of scientific inquiry, aesthetic and spiritual interests as well as the motivation to conserve nature. Defense of nature study pedagogy came from the theory of recapitulation. Recapitulation held that as humans developed they repeated the evolutionary history of the human race. Children were thus thought to be like Indians: primitive people with an innate closeness to nature. The most popular proponent of these ideas was Ernest Thompson Seton, widely read author, illustrator, and founder of the nature study boys club, the Woodcraft Indians. Nature study advocates hoped that the theory of recapitulation would allow them to bridge the modern and romantic, antimodern tendencies in their movement. Despite an intense focus on premodern virtues, nature study and the Woodcraft Indians mostly served to ease the tensions and incongruities of modern life.

This article examines the role of beauty and image in the U.S. suffrage movement. It focuses specifically on Inez Milholland and on how she and the movement capitalized on her extraordinary beauty and used her image and media popularity to present an icon for the movement, thereby softening and making acceptable the spectacle of women in public spaces and political matters. Milholland provided the movement with a representation that undermined the association of female political participation with masculine women and gender transgression. She provided a constructed model of acceptable white femininity, one that answered the anti-suffrage movement's accusations that suffragists were masculine women, inverts, and “abnormal” women whose lobbying for the vote was proof of their wretched state. Milholland thereby helped to bring women into the movement who might fear the taint of masculinity and gender transgression.

In response to the Klondike gold rush, the U.S. Army established isolated forts throughout Alaska. Between 1900 and 1905, the Signal Corps connected those posts with each other and with the contiguous United States by means of the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS). A significant logistical and technological achievement, the system of thousands of miles of suspended landlines and underwater cable included the first successful long-distance radio operation in the world. The first physical link between the United States and Alaska, the telegraph was also the first major contribution to Alaskan infrastructure provided by the federal government, marking the beginning of the government's central role in the development of Alaska.

In December 1954, the United States Senate voted 67-22 to censure the junior senator from Wisconsin. Joe McCarthy had been drawing increasing criticism for his bullying tactics in ferreting out alleged communists and communist sympathizers within the federal civil service and elsewhere. In the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the preceding spring (and especially after the dramatic televised confrontation with Army counsel Joseph Welch), the tide of public opinion finally turned against McCarthy. Still, his demagogic campaign had ruined the careers of scores of American citizens, from civil servants to artists, and had raised disturbing questions about room for political dissent within a democracy during the height of the Cold War.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, Kelley M. Turner of New York invented a telephone apparatus of very high sound sensitivity, which he called the “Dictograph.” (It should not be confused with the Dictaphone, a device used to record dictation.) Although his original idea was for a communications system with a great variety of applications, the Dictograph ultimately became one of the earliest electric eavesdropping devices, used by both police and private investigators. As such, the Dictograph played a part in some notable criminal prosecutions and was used in antiunion activity. It continued to be used in this way until it was rendered obsolescent by other technologies. The emergence of the preferred applications of the Dictograph illuminates aspects of the sociology of technology, such as the concept of “acoustic space.” It also raised issues related to the ethics and law of clandestine listening.

In the early twentieth century, several thousand Philadelphia longshoremen organized themselves into a powerful, durable, and effective labor union. These men, who proudly belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World, proved willing and able to employ the Wobblies’ direct action tactics to improve their lives. Perhaps even more impressive is that Local 8 was one of the most, perhaps the most, racially inclusive union of its era. Few institutions of any sort at that time in America could claim to be more committed to interracial, multiethnic unionism than Local 8. For ideological and pragmatic reasons, Local 8 stood for racial and ethnic integration on the waterfront. Uniting a diverse workforce was essential to the union's success. Indeed, the union collapsed when Local 8 was split along racial lines. This article looks at the rise and fall of the Progressive Era's most integrated union.

From 1870 through 1900, the National Guard attracted tens of thousands of new members by offering men the opportunity to demonstrate that they were manly men who held dramatic civic roles that put them at the center of community social and patriotic life. Time, modernization, strike service, changes in technology, and warfare all worked to alter the environment in which Guardsmen made themselves men. Guardsmen of the early twentieth century no longer found their definition of manhood and citizenship in performances for the local community. By 1917, the elements of manhood National Guardsmen shared had evolved from the focus on style and sociability they celebrated the 1880s and 1890s into an individual focus on a concept of self-discipline, self-improvement, and national patriotism. The National Guard offers historians the opportunity to see how an organization that emphasized making men manly was able to shift what that meant as definitions of manhood evolved and as the Guard worked to keep its appeal current and fresh to each new batch of recruits.

This article examines the dry crusade that brought Prohibition to the nation by tracing the early life and career of one of its chief state-level leaders. Born in Ohio and raised in Illinois, Edward S. Shumaker made a career for himself in Indiana, where he led the Indiana branch of the Anti Saloon League from the early 1900s until his death in 1929. His story demonstrates how religious and cultural influences merged in the American heartland into a moral reform movement that combined elements of traditional religion and politics with the Social Gospel and progressivism. As Shumaker saw it, the prohibition movement rested upon a fundamental argument about what it meant to be an American during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A powerful force in Shumaker's life as in the nation overall, the dry reform transformed Shumaker from a young man seemingly destined to hold a conventional Methodist pastorate into a political activist who helped make the nation dry.