The “dean” of New York's music critics a century ago, Henry Krehbiel–born in Ann Arbor to German immigrant parents—was emblematic of a vibrant intellectual community that blended Germanic and American traits. As a dominant propagator of a distinctively wholesome American Wagnerism, he embodied both German Kunst and American meliorism. As a self-made critic, he combined weighty scholarly learning and prose with a nose for news and a popularizing bent. During World War I, the German enemy incited no more patriotic response than his. But Krehbiel was increasingly stranded in postwar America. A bearer of genteel culture, he retained his iron criterion of uplift; no such aesthetic anchor would stabilize art in times to come.

For several decades historians have expressed reservations about how scholars of American studies have embraced theory and its jargons. The program for a recent American studies convention seems to confirm the field's turn from history and its embrace of the paradigms and practices of cultural studies. The nature of this gap is complicated by comparing scholarly work published since 2000 on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the respective flagship journals of each field. Scholars in both fields are committed to the study of culture, but they differ in how they understand historical agency and subjectivity. A historical overview of American studies scholars' engagement with cultural critique as well as a critical analysis of how two exemplary books in the field engage with historical change offer historians a way to understand such work not only as complementary to their own objectives, but necessary for a full understanding of the past and our relation to it.

It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905 (cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era's grassroots ferment and little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may be in order.

Although rarely considered by historians, legislative and congressional apportionments were among the most important, absorbing, and contentious political issues of the late nineteenth century. Local, state, and national party leaders struggled to shape apportionments and thereby secure disproportionate influence for the counties, districts, and states their followers controlled. Gerrymanders, in turn, not only distorted representation but often incited a furious opposition, which disrupted legislative bodies, transformed political campaigns, and ultimately produced unprecedented judicial intervention. In surveying these overlooked developments, this essay points to important questions that historians must hereafter address.

This essay examines why Richard Henry Dana III and other Boston reformers supported the Massachusetts civil service law of 1884, an even stronger measure than the federal Pendleton Act of 1883. Historians have uncovered two purposes behind civil service reform. First, reform limited the “spoils system” and curtailed the power of political parties. Second, reform increased efficiency in government. This essay argues that restricting the suffrage of Irish laborers was another purpose. Therefore, the essay runs counter to prevailing historical opinion by demonstrating that support for suffrage restriction remained an undercurrent in the 1880s, even after the failure of the Tilden Commission to implement property qualifications in New York City in the late 1870s. This exploration of a neglected topic also reminds urban historians of the deep ethnic conflict that gripped Boston in the 1880s and of the crucial role of patronage and bossism in Boston and other cities, a reality that historians since the 1980s have tended to downplay.

This essay focuses on an influential group of New England patrician intellectuals, including Henry Cabot Lodge, James K. Hosmer, and John Fiske. It argues that the New England backgrounds of these men informed their thinking about race, distinguishing them from their Anglo-Saxonist colleagues from other regions. Specifically, the Anglo-Saxonist triumphalism of the Brahmins was undercut by their anxieties about the fate of their race in New England, where they faced a number of daunting challenges. The result was the unique mixture of power and impotence, arrogance and despair, expansionism and defensiveness that distinguishes the Brahmins from other Anglo-Saxonists. The internal contradictions of the Brahmins are particularly evident in their commentary on immigration, an area where, because of their prestige and political influence, they wielded an outsize influence over federal policy.

Historians of the United States have for many decades termed the late nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” No consensus exists as to when this period began and ended, or how it might best be characterized. Most textbook authors place the origins of the Gilded Age around 1877 and its demise around 1900. Few would deny that this period witnessed a host of epochal innovations that included the rise of the modern industrial corporation, the building of large-scale technical systems, including the electric power grid, and the creation of governmental institutions that were conducive to rapid industrialization. Yet the significance of these innovations remained a matter of dispute.

Alan Dawley was many things to many people. He was a prolific and important scholar whose work has helped to define and shape the study of American history. He was a committed activist, a loving family man, a world traveler, and a man whose intellectual capacities were matched only by his generosity as a teacher and mentor. It is in this latter role that I write about Alan and in this role that Alan left his mark in a very personal sense for me.

I had the pleasure of knowing Alan in many capacities. He was my colleague, my fellow activist, sometimes my battle companion, and my friend. But it is as my teacher and mentor that I will remember him best. Indeed, even as we became colleagues and friends, there still remained the element of the wise teacher and mentor and, perhaps, the adoring student who recognized the towering accomplishments of her teacher, accomplishments greater than what she, or very few others in the profession for that matter, could ever hope to achieve.

U.S.food prices surged abruptly higher in 1910–1913, alarming urban consumers, who equated them with the high cost of living, but delighting farmers. Progressive reformers tackled detailed aspects of the food-price problem but had no overarching solution and no effective programs t o please both consumers and farmers. A volatile pattern of economic voting resulted, but unlike conventional models, it had countervailing tendencies, setting consumers against food producers. Food prices cost the Republicans heavily in the 1910 election and helped disrupt the party by 1912, ending the Republican “system of 1896.” In power, Democrats pursued primarily a southern-tinged agrarian agenda and narrowly preserved power through 1914 and 1916 but fell victim to interest-group conflicts in 1918 and economic disasters in 1920.

It would be tempting to see the late Alan Dawley as an intellectual product of the 1960s, a decade that has attracted considerable attention among historians and that shaped the political and intellectual preoccupations of a generation. To be sure, Dawley played a part in that era's social-protest movement that shaped his career as a scholar-activist. Katy Weschler Dawley spoke recently of a young man “with a purpose,” who “became committed to achieve goals of justice, civil-rights and antiwar movements.” These were indeed abiding commitments that would have made the separation of activism and scholarship difficult for any historian, and there is no doubt that Dawley was such a writer driven at the outset by political ideals.

Before engaging the critiques and recommendations that Rebecca Edwards and Richard John have so forcefully and provocatively offered us, we should remind ourselves of what is at stake in this debate. And what is at stake is simultaneously “a little” and “a lot.” And that is because periodization schemes are as much a creature of academic sociology as they are intellectual and analytic constructs. As the several references to "textbook chapters" in these essays indicate, nothing is more central to the construction of American history as an intellectual and academic community than the textbook used in undergraduate survey classes.

The intellectual and cultural critic Randolph Bourne originated the concept of a “transnational America” in 1916. More than a mere label, “trans-national America” was the articulation of Bourne's visionary new form of pluralism. This article aims to rethink Bourne's transnationalism as a form of isolationist antiwar idealism, thus helping to bridge his writings on domestic reform and foreign policy. Further, it illuminates an important moment in the intellectual history of isolationism as it assumed a positive, pluralist cast. This analysis also opens new vistas onto the development of a wide-ranging liberal opposition to American entry into World War I. Bourne's potent pluralistic, cosmopolitan ideas and the actions he took—along with those of other antiwar activists, politicians, and thinkers—helped to set the ideological parameters for antiwar thought in the period from 1916 to 1918 as well as for later American dissent, particularly in wartime.