Excavating the Colonial War on D.C. Alleys in the Making of Imperial Washington

Simultaneously a symbol for the nation and a longtime major Black city without political representation, Washington, D.C., has appeared to many—in the words of blues poet Gil Scott-Heron—as “a ball of contradictions” between affluent white political elites “who come and go” and the predominantly Black poor and working-class “who’ve got to stay.” Perhaps nowhere is this entanglement better illustrated than the McMillan Plan’s Progressive Era redesign of “Imperial Washington” made possible by the racialized slum clearance of the Metropolitan Police Department’s “war on alleys” at the turn of the twentieth century.

Minding the GAPE – July 2023

Anti-suffragists, racism in western water rights, opioid addiction among Civil War veterans, double exposure photographs, icebox cakes, Kentucky cave tourism, and much more.

New York Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, “Progressive Policing,” and the Wiretapping Scandal of 1916

New York City’s mayoral election of 1913 swept a young reformer, John Purroy Mitchel, into office as the candidate of the Fusion Party. His police commissioner, Arthur H. Woods, pledged to solve the crime problem and quell public disturbances by instituting a series of police reforms based on the progressive principles of “scientific management.” However, one of these initiatives—use of a police wiretapping unit for the clandestine gathering of information—led to a public scandal and contributed to the downfall of the reform movement in New York City.

Minding the GAPE – May 2023

Preserving Chinatowns, combatting food price-fixing, examining the roots of Memorial Day, mapping the Titanic shipwreck, attempting to protect migratory birds, and much more.

Minding the GAPE – April 2023

Easter hats, carrier pigeons, child labor laws, the Comstock Act, the long history of removing Black lawmakers from office, a Gilded Age murder mystery, and much more.

Regulating Freedom in Georgia’s County Court

During the two centuries before 1865, the U.S. South was governed by and for slaveholding planters. Southern law gave these enslavers almost total authority over the lives of enslaved people. The Civil War, however, destroyed the legal institution of slavery and, with it, the legal power of the slaveholder. Southern states faced the question of how to maintain the cotton economy without slavery. Their solution was to transfer the legal power over Black Southerners that had been held by slaveholders to the state.