Parole laws, passed by most state legislatures at the turn of the century, provide for the release of prisoners before the expiration of their maximum sentence and for their supervision during their transition to free society. This article explores the early years of the parole system in Illinois. While the Illinois parole law indicated that parole agents would watch over ex-prisoners and aid in their rehabilitation, the state instead relied on private individuals, businesses, and voluntary organizations to supervise parolees. Agreements forged between prison officials and these supervisors illustrate the extent to which the private sector took on the functions of the state during the Progressive Era. As a result, employers and voluntary organizations developed a range of surveillance practices to maintain control over former prisoners, using informal systems of assessment and notions of success to evaluate the parolees in their charge. Though the parole system represented innovation on the part of the Illinois state government—a nod to emergent rehabilitative frameworks in penology—the reliance on voluntary organizations and businesses wove older class and gender ideals into this newer, purportedly more scientific and objective institution. This essay illuminates the everyday challenges of life on parole, tracing the experiences of ex-prisoners during the process of reentry and exposing the constant negotiations between employers, voluntary organizations, prisons, and parolees.

Between May 1890 and January 1891, members of Congress debated a bill whose sponsors claimed it would shore up voting rights throughout the nation, especially in the South. The Federal Elections Bill of 1890 never became law, but the debate over it drew Americans’ beliefs about voting, race, and the South back to the forefront of U.S. politics. Historians have relied mostly on two types of sources in their explorations of how Americans viewed the bill: newspapers and the words of political leaders. But 202 letters that individuals around the nation sent to Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R-MA) during the bill's nine-month life in Congress open a new window into the debate. These letters challenge the traditional history of the Federal Elections Bill and the late nineteenth century by revealing that issues historians traditionally have limited to the Reconstruction Era, in fact, still mattered profoundly to Americans in 1890.

Over 2,000 Radcliffe College students, administrators, and alumnae irregularly involved themselves in World War I (WWI) activism. While most matriculating and matriculated Radcliffe members collectively contributed to war work, their individual records illuminate peculiar paradoxes that challenge historical concepts of America's WWI culture. Radcliffe females generally assumed war tasks untethered to their professional experiences and political aspirations. Many undergraduates and graduates contended that they chose, circumscribed and concluded war-connected work at their discretion—not Radcliffe's and/or America's. Moreover, domestic efforts designed to awaken Americans' war patriotism and activity encountered a decidedly dormant and indulgent Cambridge college compound. Not until fall 1918—over a year into U.S. belligerency—did Radcliffe's campus completely mobilize for ‘selfless' war service. Radcliffe's WWI-related chronicles—including its members’ post-hostilities humanitarian activity—suggest that “coercive voluntarism” and “complete citizenship” were not ubiquitous forces in WWI America.

This article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

Since the colonial era, the ideological and cultural usefulness of Asia has changed with evolving American needs. This article argues that the Progressive Era turn toward the Pacific world marked a new epoch and mode of transnational interchange as a diverse array of Americans traveled to China and Japan. Encounters with Asianness in situ would lead to a reinvention of the U.S. worldview in the late nineteenth century. The question at hand for certain Americans was how to become “modern,” to germinate “seeds for a new life” that would ensure the prosperity and well-being of the United States amidst momentous global changes. Instead of being antimodernist, the fetishization of Asia served as a way to rein in and define modernity for American purposes. In the process, modernist Orientalism became a framework for imagining China and Japan and their cultural practices. Buddhism, in particular, was reconceptualized as a hybrid entity that seemed to be emblematic of the dawn of a new era. Ultimately, the flow of ideas and peoples between Asia and the United States enabled Americans to construct a global “modern” identity for themselves and to carve out a prominent role for the nation within the international community.