During the Gilded Age, transnational American agents carried national values abroad, including defense of the “civilizing mission” of the white race toward people of color. This article explores race within the context of the Spalding world baseball tour of 1888-89, a transnational enterprise that marketed the national pastime abroad and, in so doing, indicated the latent, private power behind the official policies of the United States. A rather unusual segment of society to be considered for such scholarly treatment, professional baseball elites nonetheless helped generate a racist imperial ideology and thus added to the voices that set racial parameters for the American empire when it was attained in 1898. By tracing the racial attitudes of the baseball tourists, this article contributes to recent scholarly enterprises that examine foreign relations from a cultural perspective and integrate overlooked actors into the study of diplomatic history.

This article focuses on the two national internment programs developed in the United States during World War I from the vantage point of Portland, Oregon, and argues that they unfolded locally. Both the male enemy aliens at risk of internment and the girls and women who experienced confinement due to sexual activity tended to be poor. Authorities deemed that they were, or were likely to become, radicals or prostitutes—but that they were not to be prosecuted as such. Officials could banish or track them more easily as threats to the war effort, rather than as threats to urban social stability and economic development. Scholars of the home front have ignored the evolution of local-federal partnerships to track or intern these two groups and have so far failed to establish how local perceptions of the dangerous poor shaped cooperation with wartime federal authority.

On July 29, 1902 a massive funeral procession for Jacob Joseph, the esteemed Chief Rabbi of the Orthodox community, wound its way through the streets of New York's Lower East Side. The solemn occasion was marred, however, when the procession was attacked by a group of factory workers. As the melee blossomed into a full-scale riot, a contingent of New York City policemen arrived and proceeded to pummel and arrest the mourners rather than the instigators. Historians have consistendy cited this ugly incident as a vivid example of Irish Catholic antisemitism, noting that both the workers and policemen were “predominantly Irish.” Indeed, it was a quest to learn more about the roots of Irish Catholic antisemitism that drew this historian to the subject. And yet, a thorough examination of the incident produced a startling result: a dearth of Irish defendants and a flawed historiography that ultimately call into question the validity of the Jacob Joseph Funeral Riot as an example of Irish Catholic antisemitism.