This session examines how Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries built, challenged, and reimagined democratic participation through grassroots reform movements, local organizing, and political communication. Moving across the Great Plains, the Midwest, the South, and the urban North, the four papers reveal how ordinary people and local institutions shaped the political transformations commonly labeled Populist and Progressive—often in ways that complicate conventional narratives of short-lived insurgency, elite-driven reform, or linear democratic development.

Together, the papers argue that democratic experimentation in this era emerged not simply from parties, elections, or state policy, but from a dense tapestry of local associations, reform networks, and communicative practices. Andrew Varsanyi reinterprets western Populism not as an episodic rural revolt but as the product of deep, long-standing communal ties that structured life on the Great Plains. By analyzing organizations ranging from farmers’ alliances and mutual aid societies to churches and fraternal orders, Varsanyi demonstrates that political radicalism in the West rested on a durable “democratic scaffolding” of social relationships rather than on short-term crises alone.

Jeff Wells adds a parallel dimension by examining the lived experience of editors connected to the Farmers’ Alliance, Union Labor Party, and People’s Party. His paper shows that the reform press functioned as both the communication infrastructure of agrarian democracy and a site of conflict where partisan enmity, racialized tensions, and community-level disputes erupted into violence.

Ann Vlock shifts the focus to women’s political activism by reconsidering the place of Mary Elizabeth Lease within Populist historiography. Rather than treating Lease as a symbolic or representative figure, Vlock situates her within broader gendered networks of reform and challenges long-standing dismissals rooted in contemporary and scholarly misogyny.

Finally, Tracie Grube explores Progressive reform through the University Settlement in Milwaukee, showing how Wisconsin’s “laboratory for democracy” extended beyond statehouse legislation to community-level experimentation. By tracing the collaborative relationship between academic experts and local Polish immigrant families, Grube demonstrates how settlement reformers translated Progressive ideas into lived practice.

Together, these papers illuminate a rich ecosystem of democratic practice across regions and movements, reframing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as intertwined phases in a broader, grassroots-driven story of American democratic experimentation.