Millions of Americans watched the evangelist Billy Sunday preach during the years 1905–1935, and many were profoundly affected by the experience. Using letters, published and unpublished reminiscences, and other primary source documents, this article reconstructs the emotional experience of Sunday's converts and offers insights into the meaning of conversion and followership in Sunday's and other similar social movements. Through their emotional responses to the evangelist, followers recast socioeconomic problems and community pressures as personal, internal crises that could be resolved through adherence to Sunday's principles. The process of conversion was considered and volitional; it was also a long-lasting act of self-fashioning. Americans who converted in Sunday's tabernacles thoroughly reinvented themselves as followers of Sunday and then set out to remake society according to the evangelist's goals. Generalizing from these insights, the article argues that followership of inspirational leaders was a site of significant agency for Progressive Era Americans. It also identifies emotional experience as a way for historical figures to translate cultural trends into concrete social action. The article concludes by calling for additional research into how emotions shape and condition historical change.

The commemoration of the Battle of Saratoga (1777) a century after the pivotal Revolutionary victory illuminates the imbrication of public and personal memory in the politics of late nineteenth-century patriotic commemoration. The fiscal challenges faced by the white elites who stewarded the project and the compromises they were forced to make expose the uncertainties of public commemorative projects, a theme overlooked in foundational scholarship on patriotic public memory. Given the frequent failure of monument projects in an era before governments led heritage planning, the significance of individuals to the fulfillment of ambitions warrants greater consideration. Using a microhistorical approach, this paper analyzes the Saratoga Monument Board members’ ambitions, promotional strategies, and improvisations, prompted in part by an issue unique to this Battle: how to deal with Benedict Arnold's significant role in the Americans’ victory over the English? The Board's sole female trustee, Ellen Hardin Walworth, confronted a similar challenge: how to remake her life after surviving a scandalous domestic tragedy? The interweaving of their stories and strategies highlights the ways in which the cultivation of Revolutionary memory served both political and personal attempts at reconstruction without fully managing to resolve the conflicted past. Thus, scholars must factor individuals’ unique connections to the past into the broader structural characteristics of patriotic commemoration in histories of public memory and its orchestration.

In the 1890s, questions about whether to base the American currency upon gold or silver dominated public discourse and eventually forced a realignment of the political parties. The matter often confuses modern observers, who have trouble understanding how such a technically complex—even arcane—issue could arouse such passions. The fact that no major nation currently backs its currency with precious metal creates the suspicion that the issue was a “red herring” that distracted from matters of far greater importance. Yet the rhetoric surrounding the “Battle of the Standards” indicates that the more sophisticated advocates of both sides understood that, in the financial context of the 1890s, the contest between gold and silver not only had important economic implications but would substantially affect the future development of the United States.

George H. Butler was a Gilded Age writer, diplomat, and soldier, who was also a poster boy for what Richard Stott identifies as the “jolly fellow.” Butler parlayed a witty writing style to enter journalism, and with the help of his influencial uncle, Benjamin Butler, he obtained a diplomatic posting as consul general to Egypt. Overly fond of alcohol, George Butler participated in several newsworthy fights, often involving deadly force. His life serves as an archetype for out-of-control manliness, which was contrary to gender expectations of polite society in 1870s America.

This article examines how a group of Black and White YWCA staff members seized the opportunities of World War I to advance a racial justice agenda through Young Women's Christian Association programs for working women. First, they created YWCA program work for thousands of Black working women that paralleled the YWCA's Industrial Program, which followed YWCA segregation policies. Second, they made claims for social justice based on Black women's labor contributions, in contrast to both earlier reformers' focus on elite Black women and other wartime activists' focus on soldiers' service. Finally, in a period best known for White people's violent resistance to Black advances, they fostered a program culture and structures that encouraged White working-class women to view African American coworkers as colleagues and to understand racial justice as part of a broader social justice agenda. Arguing that interracial cooperation among working people was crucial to social progress, they made African American laboring women and White working-class allies both symbolically and literally crucial to wartime and postwar civil rights efforts. Their efforts contribute to our understanding of the changing discourse of “respectability” and the impact of World War I on the Black Freedom Struggle.

Sonya Levien (1888–1960) achieved a modicum of fame and fortune by writing stories and screenplays for Hollywood studios beginning in 1922 and ending only with her death. Her remarkable story began as the daughter of the immigrant working class and represents a narrative that took her from Greenwich Village to Hollywood. This essay explores her coming of age during the 1910s and, consequently, the process through which America invited those at the fringes to join in defining its national and civic creed. Herein lays the significance of Sonya Levien to an understanding of progressivism. By bridging the divides that separated Americans into groups defined by gender, class, ethnicity, and even politics, Levien engaged a number of the major issues of her day.