This article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political entities, including all three branches of government, took in response to Diggs and Caminetti’s actions highlights some of the major social changes gripping the nation. Moral panics can be investigated as crucial historical sites of contestation, revealing efforts to neutralize or turn back the societal changes perceived to be the greatest threat to the prevailing social power structure—in this case foreigners, the new leisure culture, the liberalization of sexual attitudes, and the threat of female independence. Understanding the origins and repercussions of past moral panics can help identify, understand, and possibly defuse future panics.

Literature and history as objects of study and fields of inquiry have shaped each other in profound if asymmetrical ways. This introduction provides a brief account of how these disciplines intersect in the GAPE and the contemporary era, emphasizing concerns with expertise and amateurism that also emerge in many of the articles in this special issue. Those concerns, in turn, relate to what the articles show are literature’s pedagical functions in the GAPE and the present moment and within and beyond the classroom. As it argues, literature’s pedagogical dimensions challenge distinctions between teaching, research, and activism in the context of current debates about if and how historical and literary study should be presentist and politically committed.

In 1893, Simon Pokagon, a leader of the “unremoved” Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, published a birchbark pamphlet titled The Red Man’s Rebuke. This story condemned settlers for dispossessing Native peoples of their lands and removing them west of the Mississippi River in service of their “civilization.” Pokagon’s Rebuke remains one of the most cited texts in Native American history. But what happened to Pokagon’s message after the Chicago World’s Fair? This paper analyzes five Potawatomi Removal stories told at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that Midwestern settlers found their answer to “the Indian side” of the Removal question by telling the “Potawatomi” perspective of local history; featuring “authentic” representations of Native peoples in their stories and as witnesses to their efforts; perpetuating a myth that all the Potawatomi had been removed; condemning the actions of their “dishonorable and dishonest” forefathers; and publicly acknowledging that they were occupying stolen land. By claiming that the sons of the present were not the forefathers of the past, non-Indians were settling the story of Potawatomi Removal. In the process, they gave their community and their region a past that was simultaneously romantic and tragic, positioning themselves as its inheritors and interpreters.

During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, thousands of middle-class youths published their own amateur newspapers. These periodicals were printed using the so-called toy (or “novelty”) press, a portable tabletop device that helped democratize word processing. Children often used their presses to compose miniature novels and short stories. They then shared their prose with a national community of fellow juvenile writers collectively known as “Amateurdom.” Adolescent fiction explored an array of subjects, but the frontier, territorial expansion, and empire in the West became some of its particular fixations. All that imperial storytelling, however, possessed a rich subtext. Boys and girls, reacting to late-nineteenth-century changes in the lived experience of childhood, used their printing presses to challenge various constraints imposed upon them. But in so doing, they both perpetuated and reinforced a pernicious culture of settler colonialism that celebrated the subjugation of American Indians. Ultimately, the amateur publications of children remind us that fiction is not exclusively an adult enterprise. The creative output of young people provides important insight into an underexplored realm of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s literary world.

In 1891, when U.S. realtors attempted to establish their first national professional organization, the National Real Estate Association (NREA), they turned to history to provide a shared intellectual foundation to justify collective organization. Though the NREA was only in operation for a short period, the ways its members invoked history illuminate how key assumptions about race, property, and citizenship became central to a nascent national real estate industry, predating the more well-known real estate professionalization projects of the twentieth century. History united members from different regions with little in common who were skeptical of the need to form a national institution. They used history in three ways to sustain the organization: repeating narratives, theorizing historical change, and constructing historical subjects. They infused each of these with an imperial worldview fashioned from competing lines of thought in circulation at the time. Among these were sectional reconciliation, manifest destiny, and narratives of civilizational progress. Through their actions, they embedded white supremacist Gilded Age and Progressive Era formulations of history into real estate via the new institution.

In 1911, Elaine Goodale Eastman, longtime editor of writing by her husband, Indigenous writer Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa), published Yellow Star, a narrative for white family audiences. Both the Eastmans’ already-troubled marriage and their parenting of mixed-race children illuminate the text, as does their history of linked authorial experiences. Anticipating twenty-first-century battles over competing historical narratives about Indigenous peoples in school curricula and public discourse, Yellow Star’s depiction of history-in-the-making underscores intersections between the domestic and the public, as well as between communal lived experience and larger social issues. The text simultaneously claims a potential role for young people’s literature in the cultural construction of historical understanding. Eastman’s main character, Stella/Yellow Star, arrives in a fictional New England village as an orphan of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Determined to continue valuing her Indigenous community, Stella models both a particular brand of assimilation and resistance to its would-be totalizing power. Before returning west to teach children of her tribe, she also articulates an alternative historical voice. Yellow Star draws on Eastman’s background as a white woman involved in assimilationist education. Progressive in her commitment to on-reservation learning rather than boarding schools, Goodale Eastman was nonetheless implicated in white culture’s racial hierarchies.

An analysis of Betty Smith’s bestselling coming-of-age novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn reveals how popular literature can serve as an important introduction to signature issues of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Industrialization, urbanization, and immigration are highlighted in the novel—as well as attendant problems including poverty, machine politics, child labor, and prejudice and discrimination. Profound ignorance about sexuality and conception abound in a religious culture that made premarital sex and birth control sinful and shameful, with unhappy marriages and unwanted children the result. As poverty and deviant sexuality abound, eugenics is touted as a sensible solution. The novel helps to explain why there was no organized rebellion or revolution when the struggling poor found that the promise of upward mobility was elusive. Characters have differing definitions of the American Dream. Some seek respite in religion, leisure activities, or alcohol. Others find hope in a variety of reform measures, including public health and education, settlement houses, and unions. The novel ends as the technology that made the nation’s industrialization and urbanization possible continues to produce new marvels that will transform the lives of the urban poor, bringing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era to a close.

This article explores the role of the Little Mothers’ Leagues in New York City, clubs created by public health authorities to educate working-class girls as young as eight years old who took care of their younger siblings while their parents worked. The Little Mothers’ Leagues served as an essential link between social reform and eugenic public health programming during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Eugenic maternalism, as articulated by the Little Mothers’ Leagues, distilled a sense of Americanness into a set of hygienic practices and rituals that could be easily understood and imitated. Through the Little Mothers’ Leagues, eugenic maternalist reformers addressed essential questions regarding the role of social reform in the “Americanization” process, the role of young girls as citizens and as entry points to the immigrant home, and the extent to which environmental reform could regulate the immigrant family. Examining the Little Mothers’ Leagues as a project that was both eugenic and maternalist allows us to better understand the ways that eugenic thinking permeated popular discourse through child welfare reform and domestic science.

This essay examines the efforts of Upton Sinclair and Ernest Poole to connect their respective novels The Jungle and The Harbor to the nineteenth-century sentimental literary tradition, as well as their leftist allies’ reception of those efforts. Sinclair consistently presented The Jungle as a second Uncle Tom’s Cabin, capable of moving readers to agitate on behalf of working-class immigrants, while Poole engaged reflexively with the tropes and traditions of sentimentalism in order to model for his readers how they should respond to The Harbor. Although both novels became bestsellers and influenced later writers of proletarian fiction, early leftist critics dismissed Sinclair and Poole’s sentimentalism as aesthetically simplistic and politically naïve. This essay turns instead to a slightly later contemporary of those critics, Antonio Gramsci, whose prison writings argue for the revolutionary potential of sentimentalism. Reading The Jungle and The Harbor through the lens of Gramsci’s analysis of organic intellectuals and the cathartic power of popular literary forms, this essay contends, resolves many of the problems those early critics identified in the novels.

In the late nineteenth-century United States, kerosene became a universal illuminant for artificial lighting, providing its users with a shared material environment. While kerosene users employed the fluid not only for lighting but also for washing, cooking, and cleaning, they had to deal with the material’s risks, such as fires and explosions. With the help of chemists and domestic advisors, American consumers adapted to this ambivalent material condition, weaving kerosene into their economic life and social thought. In so doing, some consumers identified as a “professional class” that navigated within this material environment through their own expertise—which paralleled their economic struggle within a rapidly growing but volatile political economy during the Gilded Age. As Standard Oil’s monopolization of the kerosene business became a substantial issue in national politics, this social consciousness among kerosene users attracted anti-monopolists like Ida Tarbell. Because Standard Oil had lowered the consumer price, these reformers sought an alternative rationale to persuade kerosene-consuming households to participate in the antitrust movement against the company. Examining how these progressive reformers turned kerosene consumers’ social identity to their political ends, this article sheds new light on the relationship between the energy transition, consumer culture, and American capitalism.

The cultural figure of the female journalist most clearly embodies the opportunities given to, and the anxieties caused by, the period’s working women. As writers, they fought for rhetorical space in the pages of newspapers and periodicals, and as women, they faced social pressure to avoid the male-dominated physical public sphere or move within it under specific conditions. Even the increasing number of female journalists at the turn of the century could not guarantee their place within the newsroom itself, let alone the world beyond its walls. Instead, their struggle to stake a claim in physical public spaces manifested in fiction and nonfiction narratives as a search for “home,” or a place of belonging. This article explores the exclusively white-woman fiction and nonfiction narratives by and about nonwhite and nonmainstream women through a human geography lens, arguing that their shared central issue is the social “gerrymandering” of women and other overlapping marginalized groups out of physical public spaces, as well as the efforts of women to “redistrict” the social spheres into a comfortable public place in which everyone could thrive.

Beginning in 1867 with the invention of the miniature (or “hobby”) press, young people in the United States began to publish their own amateur newspapers. Within the pages of those publications, adolescents included news articles, editorials, short stories, serialized fiction, poetry, and jokes. The collective result of their literary efforts was referred to as Amateurdom, or “the ’Dom” for short. Included in this teaching supplement are several representative short stories and editorials published by adolescents during the 1870s and 1880s. After reading the primary source material, students might be prompted to address some the questions for discussion included below.

Charles Eastman’s “The North American Indian” address for the 1911 Universal Races Congress (URC) in London provides multiple pathways for teaching in a comparative context. One productive approach involves setting the lecture in dialogue with Elaine Goodale Eastman’s Yellow Star, published in the same year. Another entails asking students to situate Charles Eastman’s talk in the context of the URC as a vital milestone in global thought leaders’ engagement with questions about race. This approach could include juxtaposing Eastman’s lecture with one by W. E. B. Du Bois delivered at the same convention. Pedagogy for Eastman’s speech can also locate this text in the context of his larger oeuvre, including more assertively anticolonial discourse in later writings for Indigenous readers.

Former SHGAPE president Walter Nugent passed away in 2021. On April 1, 2023, historians gathered at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) annual meeting in Los Angeles, California, to remember him. William Deverell, Nancy Unger, Donna Gabaccia, Alan Lessoff, Charles Postel, and Annette Atkins spoke about Walter Nugent as a scholar, a colleague, a mentor, and a friend; then the audience joined in with their own memories and stories. The following roundtable is a lightly edited version of the panelists’ comments from that day, including an introduction that William Deverell wrote for the journal. We have included a Walter Nugent Reading List at the end—a selected bibliography of his books and articles, as well as works about him.