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.

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.

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.