The year 2025 marks the 120th anniversary of Lochner v. New York, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down legislative limits on work hours in the baking industry. U.S. scholars generally agree this decision harmed workers and was a setback to the labor movement in the United States. The essay borrows from some of the historian E.P. Thompson’s writings on the relationship between historical inquiry and normative values in order to reflect on Lochner and the relative consensus among scholars opposing the decision. That reflection in turn serves as a point of entry for thinking about the role of normative values in doing labor history, what values we propound in the present by writing and teaching about the history of working-class people, and how those issues relate to different ways labor historians can understand what is arguably our field’s central category, class. The essay suggests that, with regard to the Lochner decision and in general, labor history is something of a different activity if the field’s orientation is toward the amelioration of time- and place-specific problems in working-class people’s lives, toward class as inherently a category of violence and injustice, or both.

Founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900, the National Negro Business League (NNBL) sought to unite Black business owners, promote entrepreneurship, and develop economic power. Despite its prominence in the early twentieth century, the group declined after Washington’s death in 1915. As a result, little is known about its organizational development. This study uses data on state and local Negro Business Leagues (NBLs), along with active and life members of the NNBL, to better understand the group’s first fifteen years. Analyses reveal that the NNBL’s development reflected closely the social and economic context of early twentieth century Black America. Generally speaking, the NNBL was stronger in states with larger urban Black populations and where the value of Black-owned farms was higher, consistent with the importance of agriculture to Black business during this era. These results both shed light on the NNBL’s early success and suggest avenues for future research on its decline.

In the early 1900s, Washington, D.C. contained many alleys in the interior of blocks inhabited by impoverished Black residents. Elite reformers engaged in an aggressive campaign to eliminate alleys, on the grounds of their purported unsanitary environment and high disease prevalence. In this paper, I combine quantitative, qualitative, and spatial sources to explore new perspectives on segregation, public health, and the racialized efforts of housing reformers during this period. I find that reformers overstated the horrors of conditions in alleys and their effects on residents’ health: poorer health among alley residents was in large part due to Black residents’ marginalization wherever they might live. Alleys’ status as racialized space, coupled with progressive paternalistic racism, facilitated the discursive construction of alleys as pathological “breeding grounds of disease.” Further, my findings shed new light on micro-configurations of segregation within racially mixed neighborhoods, as well as the social experience and meaning of such configurations. Far from indicating harmonious coexistence, the proximity of such alleys to white homes and institutions spurred elite Washingtonians’ self-interested fear of disease spreading beyond the alleys. Thus, this pattern of segregation helps explain the zeal of the campaign to eradicate alleys: as a means of achieving separation from undesired Black neighbors whom white reformers associated with contagion.

Throughout the Progressive Era, settlement houses in the urban Northeast and Midwest operated robust summer camp programs for the children of their neighborhoods. Each summer, campers enjoyed two weeks of hiking, swimming, nature study, and relaxation. This article argues that summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement-house workers during the Progressive Era. Unlike smoke abatement, sanitation reform, or playground construction, which addressed isolated components of the urban environment, camps allowed them to articulate a deeply ecological critique of the industrial city. Settlement-house workers constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to atmosphere, city streets, and immigrants’ homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. Summer camps demonstrate that settlement-house workers’ environmental philosophy permeated their reform agendas, influencing social work and recreation in addition to politics and public health.

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Socialists in Wisconsin experienced a “golden age” of political successes in the state legislature. Whereas the 1920s are commonly seen as a period of socialist decline, Wisconsin Socialists entered the decade with a renewed sense of optimism. Following World War I, the Wisconsin Democratic Party collapsed as a viable political option and the Wisconsin Socialist Party found itself the second most powerful party behind the Republican Party. Wisconsin Socialists took a pragmatic approach to legislative debates and allied with progressive Republicans to defeat conservative opposition. Socialists were vital to progressive reform prior to World War I; however, the Socialist-Progressive alliance reached its full potential in the 1920s. From 1919–31, the Wisconsin legislature passed 295 Socialist-authored pieces of legislation ranging from labor demands, public utilities, and criminal justice reform. Many of the proposals resulted from negotiations between the Socialist and Progressive caucuses. The success of the Wisconsin Socialists—and their alliance with progressive Republicans—suggests that at least in some places the Progressive Era extended into the 1920s.

Birth registration formed a key part of the administration of white supremacy between Reconstruction and World War II. In the allotment of Indigenous lands and the enforcement of de jure segregation by states, birth registration served an important ideological and administrative function. Because allotment policy combined property transmission with family reorganization, it made documentation of identity more important to the federal Indian Office. The Office imposed nuclear family structures on complex kin networks to establish access to land title, and it used documentation to alter family relationships to fit with American property law. During the same years, southern states used birth registration to fix racial identity in order to determine access to school, marriage, and many other benefits. Racial classification through birth registration, in other words, worked less to record the truth than to help produce it.

Young women growing up in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era increasingly found their relationships subject to scrutiny as doctors, parents, teachers, and school administrators began to worry about the so-called abnormal girl. Attempts to suppress the culture of crushes and romantic friendships between young women reflected these larger cultural anxieties about their relationships. But, as notions of normative girlhood began to form, this intense scrutiny of their relationships had a significant impact on their everyday lives. The young women who were navigating this scientific and cultural shift developed a range of innovative strategies from subversively concealing their relationships to boldly pursuing their queer desires.

In November 1915, popular Baltimore minister and anti-vice reformer Kenneth G. Murray became enmeshed in scandal after he allegedly attempted to engage in sex with another man at the Y.M.C.A. The revelation of Murray’s alleged queerness became a flashpoint in ongoing contestations over anti-vice reform and the legitimacy of using state power to enforce Christian morality. In the hands of his political opponents, most notably H.L. Mencken, Murray’s apparent homosexuality became a tool for vindicating long-standing assertions that men who campaigned for state-enforced morality were hypocritical and motivated in their activism by sexual and gendered pathologies. In tracing print reactions to Murray’s public exposure, this essay argues that homosexuality proved to be a powerful political weapon against progressive anti-vice campaigning like Murray’s because it was capable of reconciling competing stereotypes of religiously motivated anti-vice reformers as simultaneously overly sexual and impotent, feminized and pathologically masculine. The Murray scandal also opened the door for critiques of muscular Christianity, which made it an early example of how the sexual diagnosis of religious figures and reformers could be used to discredit social and religious activism.

The realms of banking and finance reveal a far more complex approach to early twentieth-century African American activism than the conventional protest vs. accommodation paradigm. Whites’ anxieties about Black economic and political autonomy melded into a peculiar alchemy of progressive zeal and white supremacy that professed the idealistic goal of protecting citizens from exploitative business practices but had the practical effect of destroying symbols of Black economic progress. The context that drove the opening of Black banks in Mississippi as “monuments of protest” also made Mississippi's new banking law a powerful tool with which state actors and even regular citizens could strike blows against African Americans’ growing economic, social, and political agency.

This essay examines the debate within the community of Black intellectuals and politicians about whether or not to abandon the Republican Party in 1916, and discusses both major parties’ attempts to cultivate Black voters. The objective of this article is to analyze 1916 through the lens of the rise of Black political independence and to elucidate the strains of thought that pushed an increasing number of Black thinkers—and, later, everyday Black voters—to operate outside of the political framework of the Republican Party. Though the momentous shift in the Black vote had not yet fully materialized, 1916 saw a pivotal and significant crystallization of discontent with the GOP that pushed Black voters to search for alternatives, including the radical option of a “Negro Party.” Ultimately, this new sense of political opportunity helped create the atmosphere that allowed Black voters to shift to the Democratic Party from 1928 to 1936.