Progressivism
 

header by Emerson Taymor, 2005


1. The Colonial Era: 1607-1763

2. The Revolutionary Era: 1763-1789

3. The Early National Period: 1789-1824

4. Jacksonian America: 1824-1848

5. Antebellum America: 1848-1860

6. The Civil War Era: 1861-1877

7. The Gilded Age: 1877-1901

8. Progressivism: 1901-1920

9. The Twenties

10. Depression and New Deal: 1929-1939

11. World War II: 1939-1945

12. Early Cold War: 1945-1963

13. Social Ferment: 1945-1960

14. The Sixties

15. The Seventies and After

 

 

 


Progressivism: 1901-1920

test review of Progressivism; Conflicting Historial Viewpoints: Who were the progressives?

what will the 20th century bring? Ladies Home Journal makes its predictions in 1900; the national debt, 1913- 

chart of highest federal income tax rate, adjusted for income, 1865-2014

Theodore Roosevelt and the opioid crisis

WORK

preamble to IWW constitution (1905); Muller v. Oregon (1908)

John Fitch investigates steel's long shift (1912)

Taylorism in the modern world, from Christian Parenti, The Soft Cage (2004); think Modern Times is ancient history? Think again, if you work at Amazon (New Yorker, 2014).

CITIES

the New York Times worries that the new fad of bicycling will prevent Americans from reading (1896); ads and patent medicines

the legacy of Jacob Riis Beach (New York Times, 2015)

excerpts from A Bintel Brief, a newspaper catering to Jewish immigrants in New York City; Hester Street layout; map of SF's red-light district, 1908

photo of Hamlin graduating class, 1907

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910); map of Hull House and its neighbors; immigrant illiteracy stats; census data from the turn of the century

Clifford Perkins recalls working for the Border Patrol (1910)

the Triangle shirtwaist fire: coverage from the Daily Forward; NY Times coverage; notes on PBS video; printable evidence; laws and results; instructions for the exercise

John Wanamaker, "The Four Cardinal Points of the Department Store" (1911)

MUCKRAKING

Brandeis' Other People's Money (interlocking trusts described well on pp. 52-54); Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904), excerpt; Henry Beech Needham, "The College Athlete: How Commercialism Is Making Him a Professional" (1905); how bad milk is killing people (Smithsonian, 2018); Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, excerpt (1906); George Washington Plunkitt explains how machines work; David Graham Phillips on "The Treason of the Senate"; what hints Obama might take from Brandeis' Other People's Money in terms of financial regulation (New York Times, 2009)

William Jennings Bryan biography; the Gospel Temperance Railroad (1907)

RACE

WEB DuBois, infographics on African-American life, 1900; Mary Church Terrell, "What It Means to be Colored" (1906); African-American women challenge feminism and the "new Negro," from Treva Lindsey's Colored No More; New York Times review of Birth of a Nation (1915)

hints to African-American migrants to Detroit (1918); on Progressives and race, from Mark Noll, God and Race in American Politics (2006)

excerpts from the Native American Quarterly Journal (1914)

the SF Chronicle explains why Japanese children should not be allowed to attend city public schools (1906)

the SF earthquake's consequences for Chinese-Americans; Fu Chi Hao reprimands Americans for anti-Chinese attitudes (1907); Spokane labor union opposes anti-Japanese prejudice (1909); Chinese students in the US, from Madeline Hsu, The Good Immigrants: How the Yellow Peril Became the Model Minority (2017)

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, "Race, Religion, and American Citizenship," about how Muslim immigration was restricted, from Islam in America (2010); Khaled Beydoun, "America's First Muslim Ban," from American Islamophobia (2017)

Indiana sterilization statute (1907); Margaret Sanger, "The Case for Birth Control" (1924); better baby" contests and eugenic family policies; letters to her; North Carolina weighs apology for its sterilization program, 1933-77; Adam Rutherford, "How Misguided Utopian Theories of Biological Selection Defined the 20th Century" (2022)

STATE PROGRESSIVISM

Digital History, summary of state progressivism

"Peril in the Machine," Chicago Times-Herald (1897)

"The Revolution of the Primary Under Leadership of La Follette," The Sentinel (1909); "A Third of a Century of Follettism," Milwaukee Journal, 1930; "Looking back 25 years, state points to a 'great glory' that grew from a bitter battle," Wisconsin State Journal, 1936

THE PROGRESSIVE PRESIDENTS--ROOSEVELT, TAFT, AND WILSON

1912 election platforms: TR; Debs; Taft; Wilson; a contemporary cartoon; some more notes, context, and cartoons government solutions to income inequality in 1912 (Slate article, 2012); the candidates' positions on women's suffrage; survey and comparison of the parties' platforms on women

Charles Paul Freund, "Dixiecrats Triumphant: The Menacing Mr. Wilson," on Wilson and race (2002)

FOREIGN POLICY AND WWI

Theodore Roosevelt, The Roosevelt Corollary (1904); John Judis, excerpt from The Folly of Empire comparing the enemies and motivations of US foreign policy across time

World War I timeline

Wilson's Lusitania note to Germany; the Zimmermann telegram; aerial photos of WWI battle damage

DuPont's advertising director describes the impact of the war; Patricia O'Toole, "When the US Used 'Fake News' to Sell Americans on World War I," History (May 2018)

HOME FRONT SOURCES:

National American Women's Suffrage Association, Mother's Day letter (1912); the AFL embraces equal pay for equal work (1917); are suffragettes traitors? (New York Times, 1917); Carrie Chapman Catt addresses Congress about suffrage (1917); Maine rejects suffrage (New York Times, 1917); anti-suffrage cartoons (see "opposition to suffrage"); Jean Baker on Alice Paul v Woodrow Wilson, from Sisters: The Lives of America's Suffragists; Mattie Kahn on Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, "The Revolutionary Chinese Suffragette Who Challenged America's Politics"

Cathleen Cahill and Sarah Deer, "In 1920, Native Women Sought the Vote. Here's What's Next," New York Times; "Meet the Brave But Overlooked Women of Color Who Fought for the Vote," New York Times; Nancy Hewitt and Steven Lawson, "The Myth of the 19th Amendment," Slate

speakers address vice and purity (1914); a lot of materials on the home front in Wisconsin; German-Americans and WWI Newton Baker protests treatment of German-Americans (1918); Montana reverses Sedition Act indictments, 88 years later (2007); Socialists predict that they will control things after the war (New York Times, 1918); Richard Grant, "When the Socialist Revolution Came to Oklahoma--and Was Crushed," Smithsonian (2019)

WEB DuBois, "Returning Soldiers" (1919); on African-American veterans, guns, and self-defense after WWI, from James Forman, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (2017); Carlos Montezuma on Native American service in WWI (1919); Nicole Hemmer on how Asian-American soldiers won their citizenship through service during WWI, Vox (July 2018); Lucy Salyer, "Baptism by Fire: Race, Military Service, and U.S. Citizenship Policy, 1918-1933," Journal of American History (2004)

Army "Alpha" test; different excerpts from an IQ test

WAR POSTERS:

a broader selection; another listing; a huge list, which you'll need to search; women's posters; some cartoons; British posters; still more posters; the war in the air, for you Red Baron fans; Canadian posters; a selection from the Library of Congress, covering all countries; Russian posters; more Russian posters; a big selection from everywhere; a good, well-organized site from PBS

perspectives on the war

the debate over the League of Nations: a map of Wilson's speaking tour promoting the League; the 14 Points; Henry Cabot Lodge's 14 reservations

responses to Wilson, from the New York Times:

Senator Borah's response; Joseph McCormick's response; Hiram Johnson's; Senator Philander Knox; a defense of Wilson; Wilson explains why the US must intervene in Siberia; George Norris; another piece on Norris; biographies of Johnson, Norris, Knox, and Borah; WWI and Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh on global racial politics, 1919

excerpt from George Black, The Good Neighbor: "Banana Republics"

review/timeline of what happened in 1919

Felix the Cat red-scare cartoon (1924)

Kathryn Olmsted, "The Consent of the People: Presidential Secrecy and the First World War," from Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy (2008)