This article challenges the narratives that we tell ourselves about women’s history in the nineteenth century, particularly narratives that celebrate progress in the legal status of women, based on the acquisition of rights. As it shows, legal changes in the nineteenth century lumped all women into an artificially reductive category “women,” separated them from their families’ property, and turned those claims into something so problematic that they were linked to fraud. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was difficult to imagine that family property to which women contributed all their lives might actually belong to them. The article focuses on white women of considerable means. But the point is that the problematic legal category “women” not only compromised all women’s legal claims to property, but also obscured other, important social and legal differences—including those of race and class—among them.

This article revisits Rayford Logan’s thesis in The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877‒1901 to chart how African Americans experienced joy during a racial low point—“the Nadir” of race relations. Using Logan’s claims as a conceptual framework, the article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s position on amusement and everyday Black people’s joyful acts during the post-Reconstruction period to understand “a paradox of pleasure”—feeling jovial during dark times. With the Nadir as a case study, this essay argues that historians may develop Black joy as a historical analytic by asking research questions about Black affect, employing the tools of historical imagination, and concentrating on the small delights of daily life. This essay seeks to inspire curiosity about how exploring Black life from the angle of elation, not sorrow, can produce complex histories of Black subjectivity and feeling. It proposes Black joy as an inchoate analytic in hopes of it becoming a formal mode of historical inquiry.

The Progressive Era was characterized by debates about the future of the United States and the role of individuals, households, and organizations in shaping that future. These debates included those about domestic work, sometimes specifically referred to as the “servant question” or the “servant problem.” This discourse considered not only paid household labor, but also the nature of race, gender, and American life after slavery. This article reviews the servant question in Washington, D.C., and reveals how commentators engaged with modernity and nostalgia to understand the contradiction between their sense of white and African American women’s failures and their belief that both groups of women belonged in white households. The servant question is key cultural context for a 1917 “favorite servant contest.” The second half of the article examines the clubwomen who organized the contest and the experiences of an elderly, formerly enslaved woman named Theresa Harper. The organizers responded to the D.C. servant question with an effort to carry racial hierarchies into the twentieth century, a vision of the future of household labor very different from that of Black domestic workers.

This article traces the early origins of Black consumer culture as it was portrayed in the Black press from the late 1800s to the early 1920s. It argues that Black newspapers were important agents in shaping how African Americans conceived of and interacted with the evolving commercial sphere around the turn of the century. Papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the Broad Ax, the Tulsa Star, and many others celebrated participation in the consumer arena as a respectable and desired practice. They also distinguished between shopping, as a social feminine pursuit, and patronizing Black-owned businesses, which was perceived as a gender-neutral, or even manly, racial duty. Espousing African American elite ideologies such as racial uplift and self-help, Black editors presented any purchasing of goods as an upright activity, which adorned its performer with affluence, respect, and power. Such portrayal encouraged the participation of African Americans in the consumer sphere and implied that it was an arena of similarity rather than difference.

Few figures appear so frequently and yet remain so poorly understood in the narrative of the Gilded Age as does Henry George. This historiographic essay traces George’s evolving role in historians’ accounts of the political drama of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. George’s popular memory has been shaped overwhelmingly by a few influential survey accounts that have tended to depict him either as a rear-guard apologist of old, small-town ideals or as one of many radical critics of modernity who were stamped out at the end of the nineteenth century. More recent historians have instead sought to present a nuanced George and to emphasize his more concrete and underappreciated contributions to American political thought; but even in many of their hands George’s unique ideas concerning land monopoly have proven difficult. In addition to charting these developments, this essay offers a lens for making sense of the “Prophet of San Francisco” in the twenty-first century.