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The essay focuses on the entanglement of natural resources, progress, and security in the United States. It argues that Progressive Era politics and culture were crucial for the process of securitization of raw materials and that geologists and natural scientists working for the Department of the Interior were the first to grasp the transformations imposed by the use of oil, thus making the case for the "control" of supply. The essay also introduces a research agenda for a project that looks at American power's environmental and human health implications by investigating oil pollution in water in the early twentieth century., USAbroad – Journal of American History and Politics, Vol. 3 No. 1S (2020): Special Issue

Drawing on biographies of Pennsylvania women active in the National American Woman Suffrage Association, this article explores strategies used by suffragists during the Progressive Era. During Pennsylvania’s 1915 campaign for a state suffrage amendment, supporters participated in several stunts, including suffrage gardens and tour of a replica Liberty Bell. Despite the failure of the amendment to win the vote for women, the experiences of campaigning in 1915 and up to 1919 functioned as a training ground for the first generation of women to fully participate in the political life of Pennsylvania.

This article investigates how Progressive Era writers, both popular and scientific, helped to construct multiracial identities alongside competing efforts to enshrine race into strictly black and white terms. Existing scholarship on race in the Progressive Era has not sufficiently analyzed the presence of multiracial populations. Instead, scholars have treated state and federal efforts to police racial boundaries, namely through anti-miscegenation laws and the census, as evidence that multiracial persons were a legal impossibility. However, scientific and popular writing on Appalachia provides a conceptual space in which multiracialism was not only a conceptual possibility, but was engendered. Appalachia took on increased importance during the Progressive Era as both intellectuals and reformers used the region to frame their anxieties about the limits of modernity and the threat of racial mixing. The region was home to white mountaineers who appeared arrested in time, existing in uncomfortable proximity to newly discovered groups with white, black, and Native American ancestry who also seemed to have been shunned by civilization. In attempting to understand the peculiar conditions of Appalachia, these Progressive Era writers helped to advance some of the first ideas about what it meant to be mixed-race in America.

Florence Treadwell Boynton was a dancer, teacher, and bohemian health enthusiast who spent most of her life in Berkeley, California. A childhood friend and contemporary of Isadora Duncan, Boynton e...

In September 1893, Catholic laypeople, clergy, and prelates met at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago as the Columbian Catholic Congress to discuss their church's history and chart its course into the future. The leadership of Catholic laywomen in shaping the course of the Congress has been virtually absent in scholarship, much as it was hidden from contemporaries in the past. The act of a Catholic woman speaking among both men and women in a public space was significant, as it demonstrated an increasing assertiveness on the part of Catholic women, including those holding to a conception of gendered, separate spheres, that women had key roles to play in shaping public Catholicity and Catholics’ ideas about their own community of faith. A core group of Catholic women played a hitherto underappreciated part in bringing the Congress to life. This study therefore centers women in the history of, more narrowly, Catholicism's place at the World's Columbian Exposition and, more broadly, the Catholic public of the early Progressive Era, and demonstrates the often-invisible labor in which women engaged to develop their church's intellectual life in the early Progressive Era.

The purpose of this study was to examine the life and work of Frank William Westhoff (1863–1938), a leader in music education during the progressive era (circa 1890s–1950s). Research questions focused on his work as a music supervisor, teacher educator, pedagogue, and textbook author. I also explored Westhoff’s contributions to the profession and influence on music education. Westhoff was born in St. Charles County, Missouri, in 1863. He moved to Decatur, Illinois, in 1884, and in 1893 he began supervising music in the city’s public schools. From 1901 to 1935, Westhoff served as music instructor at ISNU, where he taught methods classes, directed ensembles, and supervised music in the local public schools. He died in Normal, Illinois, in 1938. Although Westhoff was not as prominent a figure in music education as those who led the field on a national level during his time, he played an important role in sustaining, perpetuating, and expanding school music on a regional basis throughout much of the progressive era. He was a founding member of Music Supervisors’ National Conference at Keokuk, Iowa, in 1907, and published numerous compositions and didactic materials, including a statewide curriculum that helped standardize music instruction in Illinois.

The article recognizes the life and work of Edwin Montefiore Borchard, the founder of US innocence scholarship, as fitting for the Wrongful Conviction Law Review’s inaugural issue. The sources of his scholarship are located in his life and times in the early twentieth century US Progressive movement. The links between Borchard's other legal scholarship and his wrongful conviction writings are explained. Borchard's writings and advocacy leading to his main work, Convicting the Innocent, and passage of the federal exoneree compensation law are described. The article concludes that Borchard's lasting legacy is to refute innocence denial, a deeply help belief that wrongful convictions never occur or are vanishingly rare.

The various approaches to planning manifest the intellectual currents of a society. Dualities such as efficiency/community have been central to shaping contemporary planning. The quest for efficiency, the rational utilization of natural, built, and human capital, along with concern for community, the human needs and rootedness of local populations, has been an ongoing theme. We explore that duality in the context of rural regional development and how it shifted from complementary to either/or in the United States from the turn of the twentieth century through the Great Depression and the onset of World War II.

Just prior to the turn of the twentieth century, Thorstein Veblen advanced an evolutionary approach to feminist economics. A host of scholars considered in this inquiry are noted to have endorsed a...

The recent framing of our current era as a “Second Gilded Age” has been closely linked to economist Thomas Piketty's empirical findings regarding income inequality patterns in American history. Yet if we take a closer look at both the inequality data at our disposal as well as the broader social forces that have led to widening wealth gaps in recent decades, it becomes apparent that our current neoliberal era of rising inequality is far more similar to the Progressive Era than the Gilded Age. After arguing why the Progressive Era is a more apt historical analogy, this article will seek to explain why our contemporary moment has nonetheless been framed as a Second Gilded Age.

This study examines the relationship of the press to a general awakening of the social consciousness in American society popularly known as the “social awakening” during the last decade of the nine...

This article traces the rise and fall of an urban land tenure system in an industrializing American city, St. Louis, alongside efforts to regulate it in the name of health. Historians of tenement reform have placed the question of accountability at the center of reformist critiques of housing conditions in 19th- and early-twentieth-century America. Few, however, have incorporated informal and temporary housing into their analyses. This article argues that these spaces were both common and vital to the rise of St. Louis’ cyclical and often transient market in unskilled labor. Reformers, operating from an antebellum-era conception of property, sought to create a system of accountability that placed the burden of healthfulness on landlords. Yet, St. Louis’ emerging labor market undermined the accountability they sought. Confronted with a crisis of housing affordability, reformers failed to question the market or look beyond property regulation alone as a means to protect health.

Despite many historiographical challenges, in this article I briefly examine two significant school leaders from over a century ago whose lives may seem recognizable to contemporary LGBTQ+ educator...

More than 700 women die each year in the U.S. from pregnancy and birth related complications. This is not a new problem. Maternal mortality was a focal point for change in U.S. history during the Progressive Era. Many reforms were enacted during this historical period to decrease maternal mortality. This article critically examines the factors that contributed to the high rate of maternal mortality during the Progressive Era, as well as, efforts of the progressives to decrease the high rates of death during pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally the paper discusses contemporary maternal mortality.

Our article describes the work of the Digital Harrisburg Project in placing the population of Pennsylvania's capital city on geocoded historical maps in 1900–1930. We argue that geocoded census data—population tied to precise locations in a GIS—marks a game-changer for creating fine-grained historical pictures of human mobility and changing urban diversity. Because historical federal census tables recorded information about race, immigration, occupation, property value, and home address, the historian has the power to study patterns of residence that relate to complex forces such as regional and global immigration, economic change, and urban reform. Census records and historical maps are hardly unproblematic, however, and require care in analysis and interpretation. The article highlights the digital project and data, the challenges of digitizing demographic records and geocoding urban space, and potential applications for rethinking historical problems such as City Beautiful.

New scholarship in the literature and print culture of the Progressive Era emphasizes the socially and politically transformative power of aesthetic experience. Through their attention to the physical as well as ideological spaces in which the dual projects of political reform and cultural formation via textual production and consumption were carried out, these scholars offer an account of Progressive-Era aesthetic products ranging from fiction to journalism to comics to productions of Elizabethan drama as democratic sites of social good. While previous criticism of the era’s literature aligned its ideological orientation with the regressive politics of nativism and rising class divisions, these scholars, through both recovery and rereading, take a more optimistic approach that emphasizes the reciprocal nature of the textual engagement undertaken by immigrants and the working class.

The construction of the identity of the “student” has legal and social precedent, but it also has meaningful historical precedence, too. The way youth were thought of and resituated as students was an effect to recapture the youth from a largely sensationalized and sensualized society. While this identity has been reworked and reapplied, it stems from this social history recalled from memory—however distorted—and reinscribed onto the student over and over again, adapting and readapting as it needs through time. This redefinition, then, redefines schools and the practice is revealed to be ritualistic in the construction of personhood from undefined youth.

A white woman wearing a white (perhaps straw) hat stands on a raised platform outside a factory, facing an audience of men. She holds up a hand-drawn choropleth map of the United States; the states...

This article presents theoretical and historical analysis of the intersections between social work knowledge and practice and the philosophical tradition of American pragmatism. Reviewing c...

This dissertation explores the role of architecture—specifically, clubhouses—in the construction and institutionalization of modern, organized womanhood in early twentieth-century California. Beginning in the 1870s women began gathering in groups across the country for self-education, self-discovery, and civic work. They called themselves “clubs,” a term borrowed from male culture indicating a new, more formal endeavor than existing women’s circles. By 1900 some one million women made up this vast, organized, and effective network. Through clubs women successfully fought for the right to vote, for juvenile courts, kindergartens, public libraries, drinking fountains, street lights, urban parks, improved sanitation, and other civic accomplishments we now consider essential public goods. The achievements of women’s clubs have become so seamlessly incorporated into our notion of American civic amenities that they appear inevitable, natural—almost innate. The purpose-built clubhouses that played host to these efforts are equally unrecognized. Beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, clubwomen abandoned their private parlors and rented rooms to build expensive new buildings for themselves to facilitate their social action and interaction. More than one thousand clubhouses were built nationwide between 1890 and 1940, and many still stand today. California, due to tremendous Progressive Era population growth and development and property laws allowing women to own real estate, led the nation in clubhouse construction. To raise funds to build, purchase a lot, hire an architect and contractor, and dictate and iterate upon a building program, as well as to operate, maintain, and often expand a clubhouse, was a massive, and massively symbolic undertaking. Initially the buildings centered on a single large, multipurpose assembly room used for meetings, performances, and lectures. As the institution matured many clubs built monumental structures that were part hotel, part restaurant, part YWCA, part country-club-in-the-city, and part social action headquarters. Through their clubhouses women gave material expression to the evolving meanings of womanhood, conveying their particular status as property and business owners, athletes, ambitious professionals, hardworking civil servants, or sophisticated urbanites, in turn. Clubhouses are an architectural type representative of women’s influence in turn of the century cities, and they represent both the ambitious scope and the shortcomings of organized womanhood.