This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non‐specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

PUBLISHED:

A Companion to the American Revolution
Edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th‐Century America
Edited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American South
Edited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Women’s History
Edited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to American Indian History
Edited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to Post‐1945 America
Edited by Jean‐Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam War
Edited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial America
Edited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to American Foreign Relations
Edited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to 20th‐Century America
Edited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American West
Edited by William Deverell

A Companion to the Civil War and Reconstruction
Edited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American Technology
Edited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African‐American History
Edited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American Immigration
Edited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural History
Edited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California History
Edited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military History
Edited by James Bradford

A Companion to Los Angeles
Edited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental History
Edited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A Companion to Benjamin Franklin
Edited by David Waldstreicher

A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)
Edited by Thomas W. Zeiler with Daniel M. DuBois

A Companion to American Legal History
Edited by Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
Edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger

Omar H. Ali is Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is the author of In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third Party Movements in the United States and In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900.

Lloyd E. Ambrosius is Emeritus Professor of History and Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition (1987), Wilsonian Statecraft (1990), Wilsonianism (2002), and Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism (2017). He is past-president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

James M. Beeby is dean of the College of Liberals Arts and professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana. He was previously professor of history and chair at Middle Tennessee State University from 2012–2016, and before that he taught at Indiana University Southeast and West Virginia Wesleyan College. He is the author of Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901 (2008) and Populism in the South Revisited (2012). Beeby has published several articles and essays on grass-roots politics, populism, and race relations in the Gilded Age.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and associate professor of religion and history at Claremont Graduate University, and the author most recently of Christian: the Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Kathleen Dalton is a specialist in US history, though she has also taught Chinese and transnational history, gender studies, and world history. She has written articles about Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era, and in 2002 published Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. As a public historian, she has consulted with the National Park Service and the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. After teaching at Philips Academy, Andover and Boston University, she is working on a book about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and their World War I Era Dinner Club. She is especially grateful to E. Anthony Rotundo and Nancy Unger for reading and commenting on this essay.

Justus D. Doenecke is Emeritus Professor of History at New College of Florida. He has written extensively on the Gilded Age; American entry into World War I; the foreign policies of Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S Truman; and isolationism and pacifism from World War I through the early Cold War. Among his books is The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (1981). He is grateful to Irwin Gellman, John Belohlavek, and Alan Peskin for their reading of this essay.

Bruce J. Evensen is the Director of the Journalism Program at DePaul University in Chicago. For a decade he was a reporter and bureau chief in the American Midwest, in Washington, DC and in Jerusalem. He’s written and edited several books on journalism history, including Truman, Palestine, and the Press: Shaping Conventional Wisdom at the Beginning of the Cold War (1992); When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum and Storytelling in the Jazz Age (1996); God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (2003); The Responsible Reporter: Journalism in the Information Age (2008); and The Encyclopedia of American Journalism History (2007).

Maureen A. Flanagan is Professor of History in the department of humanities at Illinois Institute of Technology. She previously taught at Michigan State University. Flanagan is the author of several books and essays on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, including America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s and Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933. She is working on a manuscript on gender and the built environment of Chicago, Toronto, Dublin, and London from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Julie Greene is Professor of History at the University of Maryland at College Park and the author of several works on transnational labor, empire, and migration, including The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009). Her most recent article is “Rethinking the Boundaries of Class: Labor History and Theories of Class and Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 18 (2), May 2021, 92–112. With Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo Cheong Tham, Greene is co-editor of the forthcoming Global Labor Migration: New Directions (Illinois, 2022). She is completing a book entitled Box 25: Archival Secrets and the Migratory World of the Panama Canal.

Cristina Viviana Groeger is an Assistant Professor of History at Lake Forest College. Her research explores the history of work, labor markets, and education in the modern United States. Her first book, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard University Press, 2021) was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize by Harvard University Press for best first book. Her research has been funded by the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation, and published in the History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Julia Guarneri is Associate Professor of American history at the University of Cambridge. Her book Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (University of Chicago Press, 2017) was awarded several prizes, including the Eugenia Palmegiano Prize from the American Historical Association. She continues to write on the history of media, while her new research focuses on twentieth-century consumer culture.

Kimberly A. Hamlin is the James and Beth Lewis Professor of History at Miami University and the author of two books: Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (2020) and Free Thinker: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014).

David C. Hammack is Haydn Professor of History Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University. His books include Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (1982), Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader (1998), with Helmut Anheier, A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations (2013), and with Steven R. Smith, American Philanthropic Foundations: Regional Difference and Change (2018). Hammack holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities and Reed College, has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting scholar at Yale and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received both the Distinguished Achievement and Leadership Award of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and Case Western Reserve University’s John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching.

Alexandra (Sasha) Harmon is professor emerita of American Indian Studies and History at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (1998); Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (2010), and Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed (2019). She edited The Power of Promises: Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest (2008).

David Huyssen is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of York (UK) and Visiting Scholar (2019– 2022) at the J.F.K. Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He specializes in the history of U.S. political economy and urban life, and is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Harvard, 2014).

Brian M. Ingrassia is Assistant Professor of History at West Texas A&M University. He formerly taught at Middle Tennessee State University and Georgia State University. The author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big‐Time Football (2012), Ingrassia has published in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He is currently writing a book on automobile racing, urban culture, and the good roads movement in the early 1900s.

Raised in the Midwest, Thomas J. Jablonsky returned to the region in 1995 as a member of Marquette University’s History Department after several decades on the faculty at the University of Southern California. He is the Harry G. John Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies at MU. His scholarship has included books on Chicago and Milwaukee as well as on America’s female anti-suffragists. His recent research focuses upon the biographies of nineteenth century mayors of Los Angeles.

Benjamin Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003), Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (2008), a collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Gusky, and Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive Era Conservation (2017). He also serves as co‐editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Robert D. Johnston is Professor of History and Director of the Teaching of History program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He serves as co‐editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003) won the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association. A multiple‐award‐winning teacher, Johnston works extensively with K‐12 teachers in professional development programs.

Michael B. Kahan is the co-director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University, and a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. His interest in the historical transformation of public space has led to publications on topics ranging from the integration of streetcars in the 1850s, to sanitation reform in the 1890s, to the geography of prostitution in the 1910s, to redevelopment in California in the 1990s. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and emeritus editor of Dissent magazine. He is the author of seven books, the latest of which is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. His books on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era include Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan and War Against War: The American Fight for Peace,1914–1918. He is at work on a biography of Samuel Gompers.

Alan Lessoff, University Professor of History, was editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from 2004 to 2014. Recent books include Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History (2015) and Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1880s to 1940s, edited with Thomas Welskopp (2012).

Allan E. S. Lumba is assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (2022). He writes on the entanglements of racial capitalism and colonialisms across the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, and Professor of History, at The Ohio State University. Nichols previously was a professor at Oregon State University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and award-winning scholar and teacher, Nichols is the author or editor of six books, most notably Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (2011, 2015) and Rethinking American Grand Strategy (2021). His next book is Ideology in US Foreign Relations: New Histories (2022).

Alan I Marcus is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor and Head, Department of History, Mississippi State University. He is the author or editor of some 22 books and journals and 35 essays covering a wide range of issues and periods. His Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915 (2018) and Land of Milk and Money: Creation of the Southern Dairy Industry (2021) are his most recent efforts. He is now turning to an agricultural scientist-centered history of agricultural science in America.

Noam Maggor is a Senior Lecturer in American History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age, published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” published in the American Historical Review. Noam is currently at work on a project entitled The United States as a Developing Nation: The Political Origins of the Second Great Divergence.

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of the Department of Politics and Faculty Associate in the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. His books include: The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (1993); Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy (1999); Presidential Greatness (2000), coauthored with Marc Landy; The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014 (2015), 7th edition, coauthored with Michael Nelson; Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (2009); and The Politics of Major Policy Reform Since the Second World War, co‐edited with Jeffery Jenkins (2014). He is working on a project that examines the relationship between presidents and social movements.

Karen Pastorello is Emeritus Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY). She is the co-author with Susan Goodier of Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017). Her other works include The Progressives: Activism and Reform in American Society, 1893–1917 (2014) and A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (2008). She is working on a biography of Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, suffragist and research director for the United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau.

Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. She is the author of a number of books about American politics and economics. Her work explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West, and stretches from the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to the present. In addition to her scholarly work, Richardson writes widely for popular audiences.

Logan Sawyer is the J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law at the University of Georgia and Director of Undergraduate Studies. His scholarship examines the connections between law and political institutions in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. He earned his JD and PhD in American History from the University of Virginia.

David G. Schuster is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University Fort Wayne, and has taught previously at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul. His interests include the history of American health and culture and the development of a modern healthcare system. His is the author of Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920 (2011).

Anthony Sparacino is a graduate student at the University of Virginia in American Politics. He received his M. A. from the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses broadly on issues relating to American political development and American political thought. Of particular interest are the interplay of political parties and the state, the role of elections in political change, as well as the development of the modern conservative movement and conservative political thought.

Mark Wahlgren Summers is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has written ten books, including Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion (2000), Party Games (2004), A Dangerous Stir (2009), and Ordeal of the Reunion (2014), all published by the University of North Carolina Press. He is writing a biography of “Big Tim” Sullivan, a New York City boss. He teaches anything that he can get away with.

Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and was Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 2010–11. He is the author of Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire (2010), and Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2015), among other works.

Nancy C. Unger, President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2021–2023, is Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of the prize-winning biographies Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (2000; revised paperback 2008), and Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (2016). Her book Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (2012), was a California Book Award Finalist. She has published dozens of scholarly essays and articles, and served for eight years as book review editor for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her multi-media appearances include CNN.com, C-SPAN, NPR, TIME.com, and PBS. She is working on a book on the Diggs and Caminetti cases of 1913, which will examine progressive era efforts to employ the Mann Act to regulate American morals.

Katherine Unterman is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (2015) and numerous articles and essays about legal history and American foreign relations. Her next book project, which examines the long-term impact of the Insular Cases, has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Leigh Ann Wheeler is Professor of History at Binghamton University, former co‐editor of the Journal of Women’s History, and senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on American History. Her books, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (2004) and How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (2013) examine how individuals and movements shaped sexual culture in the modern United States. Her next project examines twentieth‐century episodes in the sexualization of women’s bodies.

Amy Louise Wood is Professor of History at Illinois State University. She is the author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (2009), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. Her current book project is entitled, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Criminal in the American Imagination, 1870–1940.”