Throughout the late nineteenth century, Cubans and Filipinos led calls for independence against Spanish colonial rule. In 1898 the United States entered the conflict under the guise of supporting liberty and democracy abroad, declaring war on Spain. The Treaty of Paris of 1898, which ended the war as well as Spanish colonial rule, resulted in the U.S. acquisition of territories off its coasts. This microsyllabus, 1898 and Its Aftermath: America’s Imperial Influence, collects articles that use the 1898 Spanish-Cuban-American War as a jumping-off point to understand how issues such as labor, citizenship, weather, and sports were impacted by America’s racism and white supremacy across the globe.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Life magazine had only approximately one hundred thousand subscribers, yet its illustrated images (like the Gibson Girl) significantly influenced fashion trends and social behaviors nationally. Its outsized influence can be explained by examining the magazine’s business practices, particularly the novel ways in which it treated and conceptualized its images as intellectual property. While other magazines relied on their circulation and advertising revenue to attain profitability, Life used its page space to sell not only ads, but also its own creative components—principally illustrations—to manufacturers of consumer goods, advertisers, and consumers themselves. In so doing, Life’s publishers relied on a developing legal conception of intellectual property and copyright, one that was not always amenable to their designs. By looking at a quasi-litigious disagreement in which a candy manufacturing company attempted to copy one of the magazine’s images, this article explores the mechanisms behind the commodification and distribution of mass-circulated images.

Since the historic uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd, growing calls to defund the police have upended mainstream political discourse in the United States. Outrage at appalling evidence of rampant police brutality and an entrenched culture of impunity have moved to the very center of public debate what were until recently dismissed as radical demands. This dramatic shift has, among other things, opened up space for discussion of the history of policing and the prison-industrial complex more broadly. In particular, abolitionists have urged examination of the deep roots of our contemporary situation. As the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba argued in an editorial published in The New York Times, “There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people.”1 That a statement like this would appear in the paper of record reflects a paradigm shift in popular understandings of the history of the criminal legal system.

The absence of Indigenous historical perspectives creates a predicament in the historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. For the first eight years of the Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, zero articles written about or by Native Americans can be found within its pages. By 2010, however, a roundtable of leading Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholars critically examined the reasons why “Native Americans often slipped out of national consciousness by the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.”1 By 2014, the journal offered a special issue on the importance of Indigenous histories during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a “period of tremendous violence perpetuated on Indigenous communities,” wrote the editors Boyd Cothran and C. Joseph Genetin-Pilawa.2 It is the observation of Indigenous histories on the periphery of Gilded Age and Progressive Era that inspires a reevaluation of the historiographical contributions that highlight Indigenous survival through the onslaught of settler colonial violence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

With #saytheirnames, the 2020 Black Lives Matters movement implores the national public to etch the names of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor into their consciousness. The fight for racial justice is a fight for attention in American popular culture. Activists push for recognition of the right to Black life, celebrities attempt to shine their spotlights on justice initiatives, and public figures debate solutions to systemic racism. The immediacy of today’s racial violence discourse parallels that of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

The protests that erupted after the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor in the summer of 2020 took the country by storm. The rapid spread of activist organizing was breathtaking to see. Over the span of a few months, no state in the country was left untouched, and more conversations began to approach acts of racial violence as an institutional problem rather than as a series of isolated incidents. Even six months prior, such widespread activism would have been unimaginable.