Historians have interpreted the rise of the wilderness holiday movement in the late nineteenth century as a middle-class response to the belief that modern urban life was leading to social degeneracy. The increasingly popular boys' camps, in particular, are said to represent a conservative reaction against the feminization of society. But the summer camp established by the Barrows family on the Canadian shores of Lake Memphremagog does not fit this mold. Rather, it was a semi-utopian environment in which prominent American social reformers felt free to apply their progressive ideals, with increased gender equality being at the forefront.

This article examines the origins of state-level regulations controlling the practice of pharmacy and the manufacture and consumption of dangerous drugs in the Gilded Age. The passage of laws regulating the market in pharmaceuticals grew out of both the precarious economic position of practicing pharmacists and widespread concern for the suffering of individual consumers. As a result, pharmacy laws and other regulations controlling the buying, selling, and use of dangerous drugs during this period should be understood as part of the effort by pharmacists to establish a professional identity for themselves. At the same time, these laws should also be understood as part of the process through which reformers sought to rationalize society toward the goal of protecting the individual consumer. Ironically, however, such efforts were intertwined with the bifurcation of consumer culture into legitimate and illegitimate realms, and with it the creation of the economic and social conditions in which new stories of individual suffering took place.

In the late nineteenth century, cycling posed numerous problems for Protestant churches and other religious organizations that sought to reform the behavior of athletes and the tone of sporting events. A wide range of improper behavior, including desecration of the Sabbath, was attributed to the “cycling craze” of the 1890s, the danger of which was heightened by the privacy and anonymity that the bicycle offered as well as it popularity among women. While censuring it on the one hand, moral crusaders also adopted the bicycle for their own evangelistic purposes, recognizing its potential as a means of transport as well as its appeal to young audiences. Some argued that it would restore the health of church congregations. Others saw it as an agent of temperance reform. Missionary organizations, including the Salvation Army, used bicycles to distribute religious and social reform literature in rural areas. A symbol of the Good Roads movement, the bicycle also promised to create a mutually beneficial moral bond between town and country.

At the height of the Progressive Era, a small circle of scholars and educators launched a zealous but failed effort to reform American spelling. Bankrolled by Andrew Carnegie, the Simplified Spelling movement epitomized the era's much-chronicled passion for “efficiency”: By replacing words like through and although with thru and altho, the simplifiers said, citizens would save both time and money. Yet the rapid demise of the campaign also highlights the limits of America's efficiency craze, even during its supposed heyday. Although some critics invoked the efficiency idiom against Simplified Spelling, questioning its utility and practicality, others denounced efficiency itself. Even if simplification made spelling more efficient, they said, Americans should retain their older forms in the name of higher values: beauty, habit, and tradition. Their rejection of Simplified Spelling stood as a standing rebuke to the gospel of efficiency, which never quite gained the full-throated worship that its high priests imagined.