The first of the nineteenth-century books about Washington, D.C., that I read at the start of my dissertation research, John Forney's Anecdotes of Public Men (1873), included this description of one of the capital's residents:

What, one might ask, is The Diary of a Public Man, and why should subscribers to The Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era want to know about it? The diary purportedly dates from the tension-filled weeks preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, but it was first published in a popular magazine in 1879. Its appearance then suggested that somebody thought it would attract an audience of Gilded Age readers, which indeed happened. Their curiosity was intensified because the diary's publisher concealed the identity of its author. We now know why the alleged diarist had to be cloaked in anonymity—the supposed prewar diary actually was written shortly before its publication, long into the postwar era. Most outrageously, the diarist proves to have been an imaginary construct—not a real person.

During the late nineteenth century, contests over prohibition gripped hundreds of American towns and cities, nowhere with greater consequences than in the post-Reconstruction South. This article examines those effects in Greenville, South Carolina, a small marketing and manufacturing center in the white-majority upcountry. During the 1880s, prohibition split white Democrats who had “redeemed” Greenville's town government just a few years before and led to a surge in voter registration and participation among African Americans. The liquor question's repercussions for politics in the Gilded Age South have been largely neglected, both by social historians of prohibition and by political historians, who have failed to see it as one of the issues that roiled the region's politics between Reconstruction and the Populist rebellion. This article also emphasizes the overlooked importance of municipal elections and governance—even in so small a place as Greenville—as an arena for African Americans’ political activity. Greenville's black voters used their influence during the 1880s to achieve modest but tangible gains in education and municipal services and to erect at least a partial bulwark against the tide of white supremacy. These developments were part of a region-wide revival in African Americans’ municipal power, which Southern Democrats were careful to target in their disfranchising campaigns as the century drew to close.

This article examines colonial legal categories such as “national status” and “coastwise shipping” that shaped the movement of goods and people between U.S. colonies and the metropole. Focused on the case of Puerto Rican migration to the U.S. mainland in the early twentieth century, it argues that these legal categories conditioned migration patterns and that migrants, in turn, actively shaped new legal categories. Drawing on sources from both U.S. and Puerto Rican archives, this article contributes to an emerging body of literature on U.S. imperialism, law, and migration in the Americas. It shows that colonial legal categories are critical to understanding enduring migration streams to the United States that have long been embedded in imperial relationships.

At the start of the twentieth century, U.S. citizens began settling and investing on the Isle of Pines off the coast of Cuba. U.S. entrepreneurs who believed the Isle was or would become U.S. territory bought vast tracts from Spanish and Cuban landowners. They then subdivided the land and marketed it to farmers and middle-class Americans still in search of opportunity on a disappearing frontier. These landholding companies' promotions helped shape the assumptions and expectations of thousands of Americans who settled on the Isle over the next few decades. Companies portrayed the Isle as a tropical paradise safe for white settlement and ripe for development. They promised high returns-on-investment for those looking to engage in citrus production for export, as well as a healthful climate for those plagued by chronic illness. Some of these settlers publicly echoed landholding companies' portrayal and remained on the Isle for years. Others found the Isle's promise to be grossly exaggerated and returned to the United States feeling swindled by unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Although set in a foreign land, U.S. interest in the Isle reveals much about life in the United States, including the changing nature of expansion, the growing power of advertising, and middle-class discontent.