[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.]

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.

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.

Conflicts over citizenship and military service became a central issue in Italian-American relations in the early twentieth century. The United States and Italy founded their concepts of citizenship on two different bases, jus soli and jus sanguinis. As a consequence of this difference and the swelling number of Italian immigrants naturalized in America, the two governments' policies about naturalization and military service collided until 1918. The Italian government's policy put Italian Americans' loyalty to the United States in jeopardy, especially for men who wished to return to Italy for business or educational purposes. Thus, the study of Italian Americans' experiences in the context of the policies of both countries illustrates a key aspect of the relationship between the United States and Italy, both in terms of social experience and public policy.