In 1898, the American Federation of Labor feared that colonial expansion would militarize the republic and undermine the living standards of American workers. Subsequent expansion of industrial production and of trade union membership soon replaced the fear of imperial expansion with an eagerness to enlarge the domain of American unions internationally alongside that of American business. In both Puerto Rico and Canada important groups of workers joined AFL unions on their own initiative. In Mexico, where major U.S. investments shaped the economy, anarcho-syndicalists enjoyed strong support on both sides of the border, and the path to union growth was opened by revolution. Consequently the AFL forged links there with a labor movement very different from itself. Unions in Mexico became tightly linked to their new government, while World War I drove the AFL's leaders into close collaboration with their own. The Pan-American Federation of Labor was more a product of diplomatic maneuvering than of class solidarity.

[Note: What follows is a selection from a recent exhibition on Gilded Age political cartooning at the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Center in Fremont, Ohio, a sponsoring institution of Shgape and this journal from their inception. As the essay explains, the Hayes Center's first-rate research library includes many sources for scholarship on this craft, which thrived during the late 1800s. In this illustrated essay, Hayes Center director Tom Culbertson, an avid scholar of political cartooning, provides background information on major personalities of Gilded Age political cartooning, their publications, politics, mindset, and techniques. Appearing in weekly magazines, frequently filling a full page and printed in color, drawn in copious detail and finely engraved, Gilded Age cartoons represented a lavish, at times gaudy form of political expression to which this six-by-nine inch, black-and-white journal cannot do justice. Teachers and scholars routinely use such cartoons to illustrate other points without much thought to the circumstances of their drawing and printing. Superficially familiar, these cartoons take on new life when seen in their original form and setting.]

James Brown Scott played a key role in the growth of public international law in the United States from the 1890s to the 1940s. While little remembered today, he was well-known among his contemporaries as a leading spokesman for a new and important discipline. Scott rose from obscure middle-class origins to occupy a prominent and influential place as an international lawyer who shared his legal expertise with seven presidents and ten secretaries of state. By examining his life we gain insight into the establishment of public international law as a discipline and on the era when lawyers qua lawyers began to help shape American foreign policy.

British and American intellectuals began to formulate ideas about so-called great books from the mid-1800s to 1920. English critic Matthew Arnold's writings served as the fountainhead of ideas about the “best” books. But rather than simply buttress the opinions of highbrow cultural elites, he also inspired those with dreams of a democratized culture. From Arnold and from efforts such as Sir John Lubbock's “100 Best Books,” the pursuit of the “best” in books spread in both Victorian Britain and the United States. The phrase “great books” gained currency in the midst of profound technical, cultural, educational, and philosophical changes. Victorian-era literature professors in America rooted the idea in both education and popular culture through their encouragements to read. Finally, the idea explicitly took hold on college campuses, first with Charles Mills Gayley at the University of California at Berkeley and then John Erskine's General Honors seminar at Columbia University.

Ancient Rome is a powerful metaphor in the western imagination. It is very much alive today. The Roman Republic inspires images of democracy and the empire is the very epitome of decadence. The collapse of this, the greatest of empires, is a parable. The Progressive Era opened with overt imperial ambitions and ended with the collapse of Woodrow Wilson's plans for a Pax Americana. Throughout this period, the symbol of Rome was explicitly used to justify or condemn expansion, warn of the dangers of immigration and commercialization, attack America's enemies, and praise the nation's allies. To figures as diverse as Kaiser Wilhelm II, Henry Adams, and Theodore Roosevelt, Rome was both a model and a warning. Politicians, historians and other commentators saw America as heir to the Roman legacy. Race theorizers claimed that Americans were either the modern Romans or the descendants of the Barbarians—promoters of ordered modernity or champions of individual democracy.

This study of the lives and careers of Claude C. Hopkins and Earnest Elmo Calkins from their boyhood experiences with periodical advertising in the 1870s though their professional contributions to the field at the turn of the century provides a ground-level view of modern advertising's emergence. Among other things, it shows that certain marketing concepts emerged earlier than is often assumed and that these concepts were often developed independent of major advertising agencies and far from the urban centers of advertising production. Calkins and Hopkins had very different philosophies of marketing, and between them they defined a spectrum of advertising message strategy that still characterizes the field. The happenstance that Hopkins and Calkins both wrote ads for the Bissell Carpet Sweeper Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, provides a symbolic center for this analysis that brings these developments into focus.

Editor's note: In its October 2004 issue, this journal published a vivid account by Lewis Saum, the well-known historian of the nineteenth-century press, of the dispatches and misadventures of Chicago reporter James “Phocion” Howard during the Black Hills gold rush of 1875. A complete product of an age when news correspondents made no pretence of detachment and no effort to avoid becoming part of their stories, Howard, through what he wrote and what he did, was the sort of reporter who contributed mightily to the image of the post-Civil War era as a Gilded Age. This brief account follows Howard back a little in time, to 1873, when he was noisily bursting illusions along the line of the Northern Pacific Railroad just at the moment when that line's bankruptcy hurled the country into its worst economic collapse in decades.

In the 1890s, Hardy L. Brian was among Louisiana's leading Populists. He was a key founder of the Louisiana People's Party and served as state party secretary and editor of the organization's weekly newspaper. Son of a prominent agrarian dissident from the Louisiana piney woods, Brian believed deeply in the power of an aroused populace to bring fundamental changes to American political and economic life. Over time, however, he abandoned social movement organizing in favor of conventional party politics. The climax of this journey came in 1896, when Brian joined fellow delegates to the Populist national convention to give the People's Party presidential nomination to Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan. The Bryan nomination cost the Populists their independent political identity and precipitated a collapse of their party organization. Hardy L. Brian's journey from agrarian rebel to conventional reform politician reflects a loss of faith in the power of the Populist vision. While he never abandoned the goal of fundamental change, Brian lost faith in the power of this goal to inspire and arouse. Instead, he embraced the logic of conventional party politics, and upon that logic the Populist vision foundered.

Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics under-stood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.

The origin of Lewis Hine's invention of social documentary photography can be found in his intellectual alliance to pragmatism. Reading Hine's photographs as primary sources of the author's intent, in context with Hine's progressive intellectual milieu and in contrast with his contemporaries, Jacob Riis and Alfred Steiglitz, reveals Hine as a self-conscious and tolerant commentator on the lives of individual immigrants and workers. Although Hine left the objects of his portraits mostly unnamed, through his documentary style, he conferred upon them individual identity in contrast to the nativism, exploitation, and social Darwinism that surrounded immigration issues in the early 1900s. Through his images, Hine transmitted his own perceptions of 1900s New York City, especially Ellis Island. Since Hine was inspired by William James's formulation of “lived experience,” the historian can read Hine through a lens of James's philosophy, solving the pragmatist problem of communicated language by replacing words with images.

During the 1909 New York mayoral campaign, the Socialist newspaper, the New York Call, published a series of seven political cartoons signed by Josh Nolan. Analysis of the subject and style of these cartoons suggest that the signature on them was an anagrammatic pseudonym for painter John Sloan, a leading figure of the Ash Can School and later art director for the Masses. Sloan confirms this in his diary, which provides the reader with evidence of the painter's inclination to use anagrams and fictitious names. The cartoons document a forgotten aspect of the artist's career and reveal many of his political and aesthetic influences. The images also explicate Sloan's personal political commitments and the origins of his later unique imagery. This essay examines Sloan's early cartoons, while questioning why Sloan would choose to hide his identity when creating images for the New York Call.

When Dom Pedro II, emperor of Brazil, visited America in 1876, he planned to assess industrial and technological innovation on display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and to pay visits to men whom he admired. Most Americans were fascinated by the emperor, even though his visit came at an awkward time. During the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, America was hosting an emperor—and from the last major slaveholding country. This article reviews newspaper accounts of the visit and analyzes the ambivalence displayed toward his visit. Americans were supposedly devoted to equality. Nonetheless, wherever he went during his three-month sojourn, the emperor was met by admiring crowds. One newspaper explained: “It is not the monarch so much as the novelty that attracts in this country.” This article views the visit not from Dom Pedro's impressions of America, but from American responses to the visit of a hereditary monarch—the first to travel around America during his reign. The paper concludes that centennial-year fascination with royalty generally overcame historic contempt for hereditary privilege and lack of interest in royal visitors. Such ambivalent attitudes toward visiting royalty continue into the present day.