Sublime

If Perkins, the Progressive turned New Dealer, spent her life addressing problems left behind by Greeley’s Civil War generation—corporate power, exploited labor, political corruption, poverty—Rustin spent his battling injustices that the New Deal generation didn’t address: racism, segregation, and the threat of militarism to world peace. No one in

While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication.

One piece of earned heroism is the miners’ place at the center of our history of organized labor. Miners understood their importance to industrialization and would become central figures in the history of unions. One of the most impactful strikes happened at Matewan, West Virginia.

Princeton University’s first graduate student, future president James Madison, brought one slave with him to campus and another to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The latter he had to free: all that talk of liberty had ruined him, a poison to the rest of the plantation. He took the former home with him.

I’m not sure what is more disturbing—that the annexation of the Philippines, along with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and Guam in 1898 is a betrayal of the principle of self-government established in 1776 or Lodge’s allegation that the principle of self-government was, is, and always will be a delusion.

“It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.”

At a ball that evening, Florida’s governor, Albert Gilchrist, lauded Flagler yet again, issuing a proclamation that stated, “The building of this great oversea railroad is of nationwide importance, second in importance only to the construction of the Panama Canal.” President William H. Taft sent along a personal note of congratulations. But by this