Chair: Donald Ratcliffe, University of Oxford

William R. Brock (University of Cambridge): 1870-1900: The Democratic Age?

Chair: Elizabeth Clapp (University of Leicester)

Kathryn Kish Sklar (State University of New York, Binghampton, and Oxford): Documenting New Perspectives on White Women in the Freedmen’s Aid Movement, 1870-1890

Thomas Dublin (State University of New York, Binghampton): Documenting a Multiracial Movement in Baltimore’s YWCA, 1880-1930

Jay Kleinberg (Brunel University): Creating a Document Project on Mothers’ Pensions, 1899-1939

Chair: Axel Schaeffer (Keele University)

William Jones (Cardiff University): ‘Going into Print’: Published Emigrant Letters in Wales in the Nineteenth Century

Murney Gerlach (Fremont, Ohio): William E. Gladstone and the United States: Ideas of American Progress

Howell John Harris (University of Durham): Between Convergence and Exceptionalism: Americans and the 'British Model' of Industrial Relations, c. 1870-1920

Richard Hofstadter’s Age of Reform after Fifty Years 

Chair: Alan Lessoff (Illinois State University)

Robert Johnston (University of Illinois at Chicago): Age of Reform and the Progressive Era

Gillis Harp (Grove City College): Age of Reform in the 1950s

Rethinking Reconstruction

Chair: Heather Cox Richardson (University of Massachusetts)

Nichola Clayton (University of Sheffield): Henry Wilson’s Southern Tour and the Question of Confiscation in 1867

William G. Merkel (Columbia University): New Constitutional Perspectives on Reconstruction, the Militia, and the Right to Arms

Chair: Peter Argersinger (Southern Illinois University)

Constance Schultz (University of South Carolina): Virgins or Vamps? Images of Women in Late Nineteenth Century American Stereographs

Chair: Richard Carwardine (University of Oxford)

John Ashworth (University of Nottingham): The Kansas-Nebraska Act Revisited

Learning the Lessons of Nineteenth-Century America 

Chair: Susan-Mary Grant (University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne) 

Thomas Knoles (American Antiquarian Society): Boiling the ‘Monkey’ and Other Educational Experiences in the Journal of a Student of John and Henry Thoreau

Lucia Knoles (Assumption College):‘For the want of Knowledge We Are Killed All the Day’: The Larger Lessons of Freedmen’s Schools

John McClymer (Assumption College): The Americanization of Shockheaded Peter: Nineteenth-Century Cautionary Tales

New Perspectives on Reform and Activism

Chair: Wanda Hendricks (University of South Carolina) 

Lewis Perry (St. Louis University): Abby and Julia Smith and the American Tradition of Civil Disobedience

Ruth Crocker (Auburn University): New Perspectives on the Settlement Movement

Elisabeth Israels Perry (St. Louis University): The Progressives and the Prostitute: Anna Moscowitz Kross and the Campaign against New York City’s ‘Women’s Court’

Rethinking Political Movements 

Chair: Jo Ann Argersinger (Southern Illinois University) 

Charles Postel (California State University, Sacramento): Populist Moderns: Rethinking Rural Protest in the Gilded Age

Edward Rafferty (Boston University): W.J. McGee, American Conservation, and New Liberalism in the United States, 1870-1910

Race and Memory in the Progressive South

Chair: Michael O’Brien (University of Cambridge)

Robert J. Norrell (University of Tennessee, Knoxville): Rehabilitating Booker Washington: How Historians Have Wronged the Wizard

Bruce Baker (Royal Holloway College, London): Reconstruction and Public Memory in Anderson County, South Carolina, 1905-1920

Chair: John A. Thompson (University of Cambridge)

Jay Sexton (University of Oxford): The Greater Aberration: Hamilton Fish, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Multilateral Initiative of 1875

Eric Rauchway (University of California, Davis): Globalization and the Roots of American Exceptionalism