Category: Progressive Era

IMAGE: Suffrage Parade (1912)

  This photograph by the Associated Press depicts a woman’s suffrage parade in New York on Saturday, May 4, 1912. Harriot Stanton Blatch, the daughter of feminist pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton, had begun popularizing the tactic of urban suffragist parades as…

1910s

The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed many sometimes-wrenching changes, and perhaps no decade was more profoundly revolutionary for the United States and the world than the 1910s.  During this decade, American women finally gained the right to vote and…

1900s

Overview Near the beginning of his memoir Growing Up (1982), journalist Russell Baker describes the United States of his mother’s childhood, in the first decade of the twentieth century, as a “young country,” one that seemed to his grandfather at least, as the “greatest country…

1890s

Overview The nineteenth century had always been an age of certainties, but by the 1890s, some of the post-Civil War consensus about American civilization and progress was beginning to fragment as it had never quite done before.  Populists challenged the distribution…

ESSAY –Women and the Election of 1912

In Fall 2010, Dickinson College student Alix Poeton offered a useful reminder that women affected American presidential politics before the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.  She focuses on the role of women in 1912 and helps explain their support for…

ESSAY –Election Day 1912

Dickinson College student Will Nelligan produced a creative examination of how ex-president Theodore Roosevelt experienced Election Day on 1912, when he was running as a Progressive or Bull Moose candidate in a three-way contest that included Democrat Woodrow Wilson (the…