In this reading class, we will focus our attention on US Progressivism in the early part of the 20th century and its relations with Asia/Pacific. This period of US history prefigures many facets of globalism of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Schools became a regular feature of society and their development was considered benefitial not just for the citizens but also for state building. This idea is crucial to understand why colonial empires tried to propagate schools in colonies, most notably the US colonialism in the Philippines. Free trade was intricately connected with the idea of imperialism. Politics was centered around a series of dichotomies like natives versus immigrants, regulations on business versus corporate interests, and transborder labor versus empire of free trade.
Although I understand that many of the prospective students have not taken introductory classes in or are not keep on US history per se, it is important to pay attention to contradictions and nuances, which you find more in history than in theory-oriented disciplines. In this class, we will study social history, in that we pay attention to ordinary people rather than political development and economic growth.
Given your diverse interests, I do not expect you to be steeped in US history but I would like you to consider the ideas born out of this period like “democracy,” “business interests,” and “race” in relation to the subject and area of your interests. I would also like to have you familiarize yourself with the minute description of the locality. For starters, let me say that it is important to pay close attention to the triad of social history: race (ethnicity), gender and class. In the end, readings in social history should train you to deal with complex argumentation, collect and present relevant facts and come up with nuanced conclusions.
We will discuss what to read at Guidance on Week 1. I have culled a majority of articles from The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
Week 2 [America’s Encounter with Asia]
Sexton, J. A. Y. “William H. Seward in the World.” The Journal of the Civil War Era 4 3 (2014): 398-430.
Sections from Lears, T. J. Jackson. Rebirth of a Nation : The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. New York: HarperCollins, 2009.
Week 3 [Capitalism and State-Building]
Rodgers, Daniel T. “Capitalism and Politics in the Progressive Era and in Ours.” JGAPE 13 3 (2014): 379-86.
Sections from Skowronek, Stephen. Building a New American State : The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920. Cambridge Cambridgeshire ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
Further Readings:
Clemens, Elisabeth S. “Rereading Skowronek: A Precocious Theory of Institutional Change.” Social science history 27 3 (2003): 443-53.
Burwood, Stephen. “Debsian Socialism through a Transnational Lens.” JGAPE 2 3 (2003): 253-82.
Kramer, Paul A. “Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, the United States, and the World.” JGAPE 15 3 (2016): 331-62.
Maggor, Noam. “The Great Inequalizer: American Capitalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.” JGAPE 15 3 (2016): 241-45.
Sklar, Martin J. “Thoughts on Capitalism and Socialism: Utopian and Realistic.” JGAPE 2 4 (2003): 361-76.
Chausovsky, Jonathan. “From Bureau to Trade Commission: Agency Reputation in the Statebuilding Enterprise.” JGAPE 12 3 (2013): 343-78.
Week 4 [Empire]
DeLay, Brian. “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations*.” Diplomatic History 39 5 (2015): 927-42.
Kramer, Paul A. “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” The American Historical Review 116 5 (2011): 1348-91.
Further Readings:
Kaplan, Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Convergences. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002.
LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1963.
Week 5 [Democracy]
Beckert, Sven. “Democracy and Its Discontents: Contesting Suffrage Rights in Gilded Age New York.” Past & present 174 (2002): 116-57.
May, Glenn. “Civic Ritual and Political Reality: Municipal Elections in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Philippine Colonial Democracy. Ed. Paredes, Ruby R. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1989, 13-40.
Further Readings:
Neuman, Johanna. “Who Won Women’s Suffrage? A Case for “Mere Men”.” JGAPE 16 3 (2017): 347-67.
Nicolosi, Ann Marie. “”The Most Beautiful Suffragette”: Inez Milholland and the Political Currency of Beauty.” JGAPE 6 3 (2007): 286-309.
Richter, Hedwig. “Transnational Reform and Democracy: Election Reforms in New York City and Berlin around 1900.” JGAPE 15 2 (2016): 149-75.
Week 6 [Labor]
Greene, Julie. “Movable Empire: Labor, Migration, and U.S. Global Power During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.” JGAPE 15 1 (2016): 4-20.
Okada, Taihei. ” Underside of Independence Politics: Filipino Reactions to Anti-Filipino Riots in the United States.” Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 60 3 (2012): 307-35.
Further Readings:
Bender, Daniel E. American Abyss : Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry. Cornell Paperbacks. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013.
Sklar, Martin J. The United States as a Developing Country : Studies in U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s. Cambridge [England] ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Montgomery, David. “Workers’ Movements in the United States Confront Imperialism: The Progressive Era Experience.” JGAPE 7 1 (2008): 7-42.
Week 7 [Business]
Sections from Chandler, Alfred Dupont. The Visible Hand : The Managerial Revolution in American Business. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1977.
Baick, John S. “Cracks in the Foundation: Frederick T. Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the China Medical Board.” JGAPE 3 1 (2004): 59-89.
Further Readings:
Kolko, Gabriel. The Triumph of Conservatism : A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916. New York: Free Press Collier Macmillan, 1977.
Weinstein, James. The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981.
Leccese, Stephen R. “John D. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, and the Rise of Corporate Public Relations in Progressive America, 1902–1908.” JGAPE 16 3 (2017): 245-63.
VandeCreek, Drew. “Emory Johnson and the Rise of Economic Expertise in the Progressive State, 1898–1913.” JGAPE 17 2 (2018): 276-96.
Week 8 [Business and Law]
Novak, William J. “Law and the Social Control of American Capitalism.” Emory Law Journal 60 2 (2010): 377.
Khan, L. M. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” Yale Law Journal 126 3 (2017): 710-805.
Week 9 [Migration]
Sections from Ngai, Mae M. Impossible Subjects : Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004.
Sections from Gabaccia, Donna R. Foreign Relations : American Immigration in Global Perspective. America in the World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012.
Further Readings:
Kramer, Paul A. “Imperial Openings: Civilization, Exemption, and the Geopolitics of Mobility in the History of Chinese Exclusion, 1868–1910.” JGAPE 14 3 (2015): 317-47.
Troutman, John W. “Creating Community in the Confines of “Fine Barbaric Thrill”: Joseph Kekuku, a Hawaiian Manhattan, and the Indigenous Sounds of Modernity.” JGAPE 14 4 (2015): 551-61.
Sinn, Elizabeth. “Pacific Ocean: Highway to Gold Mountain, 1850–1900.” Pacific historical review 83 2 (2014): 220-37.
Weeks 10 [Encounters Abroad]
Adams, Ellen E. “Colonial Geographies, Imperial Romances: Travels in Japan with Ellen Churchill Semple and Fannie Caldwell Macaulay.” JGAPE 13 2 (2014): 145-65.
Lake, Marilyn, and Vanessa Pratt. “Blood Brothers. Racial Identification and the Right to Rule: The Australian Response to the Spanish-American War.” Australian Journal of Politics & History 54 1 (2008): 16-27.
Further Readings:
McVety, Amanda Kay. “The 1903 Skinner Mission: Images of Ethiopia in the Progressive Era.” JGAPE 10 2 (2011): 187-212.
Phoenix, Karen. “A Social Gospel for India.” JGAPE 13 2 (2014): 200-22.
Zeiler, Thomas W. “Basepaths to Empire: Race and the Spalding World Baseball Tour.” JGAPE 6 2 (2007): 179-207.
Adams, Bluford. “World Conquerors or a Dying People? Racial Theory, Regional Anxiety, and the Brahmin Anglo-Saxonists.” JGAPE 8 2 (2009): 189-215.
Weeks 11 [Filipinos]
Prieto, Laura R. “A Delicate Subject: Clemencia López, Civilized Womanhood, and the Politics of Anti-Imperialism.” JGAPE 12 2 (2013): 199-233.
Ventura, Theresa. ““I Am Already Annexed”: Ramon Reyes Lala and the Crafting of “Philippine” Advocacy for American Empire.” JGAPE 19 3 (2020): 426-46.
Further Readings:
Charbonneau, Oliver. ““A New West in Mindanao”: Settler Fantasies on the U.S. Imperial Fringe.” JGAPE 18 3 (2019): 304-23.
McKenna, Rebecca Tinio. “Igorot Squatters and Indian Wards: Toward an Intra-Imperial History of Land Dispossession.” JGAPE 18 2 (2019): 221-39.
Moran, Katherine D. “Catholicism and the Making of the U.S. Pacific.” JGAPE 12 4 (2013): 434-74.
Shott, Brian. “Forty Acres and a Carabao: T. Thomas Fortune, Newspapers, and the Pacific’s Unstable Color Lines, 1902–03.” JGAPE 17 1 (2017): 98-120.
Week 12 [Schools]
Chiles, Robert. “School Reform as Progressive Statecraft: Education Policy in New York under Governor Alfred E. Smith, 1919–1928.” JGAPE 15 4 (2016): 379-98.
Sections from Salamanca, Bonifacio S. The Filipino Reaction to American Rule, 1901-1913. Quezon City: New Day Publisher, 1984 [1968].
Further Readings:
Zunz, Olivier. Why the American Century? Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Ewert, Cody Dodge. “Schools on Parade: Patriotism and the Transformation of Urban Education at the Dawn of the Progressive Era.” JGAPE 16 1 (2017): 65-81.
Zhang, Grace Xinfu, and Ron Sheese. “100 Years of John Dewey and Education in China.” JGAPE 16 4 (2017): 400-08.
Week 13 [Technology / Science]
Beckert, Sven. “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton.” The Journal of American history 92 2 (2005): 498-526
Hersey, Mark D. ““What We Need Is a Crop Ecologist”: Ecology and Agricultural Science in Progressive-Era America.” Agricultural history 85 3 (2011): 297-321.
Further Readings:
Kemp, Kathryn W. ““The Dictograph Hears All”: An Example of Surveillance Technology in the Progressive Era.” JGAPE 6 4 (2010): 409-30.
McDonald, Jason. “Making the World Safe for Eugenics: The Eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin’s Encounters with American Internationalism.” JGAPE 12 3 (2013): 379-411.
Rosenbloom, Nancy J. “From Regulation to Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century.” JGAPE 3 4 (2004): 369-406.
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