A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to American History
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 2187

Beschreibung

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. * The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era * Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties * Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches * In today's era, often referred to as a "second Gilded Age," this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society * Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Gilded Excesses, Multiple Progressivisms

References

Part I: Overview‐Definitions, Precursors, and Geographies

Chapter One: Reconstructing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Redefining the Era

Writing a New Narrative

The Universal Suffrage Years

Restricting the Suffrage

Defining the Government

Reforming America

Reconstructing America

References

Chapter Two: Precursors to Gilded Age and Progressive Era Reforms

An “Age of Reform”: Mugwumps and Political Reformers

“A Search for Order”: Industrialization and its Consequences

Social Justice and the Settlement House Movement

In Search of Progressivism: The Kaleidoscope of Reform Traditions

The Transnational Debate and Precursors to Reform

The Labor Movement and the Era of Reform

Agrarian Discontent and its Legacies

Conclusion: The Debate Continues

References

Chapter Three: Urban America

“The Loop”: Urban Downtowns

“Little Sicily,” “Deutschland,” and “Chinatown”: Ethnicity and Immigration

The Black Belt: Race and the City

The “Slum,” the “Zone of Workingmen’s Homes,” and the “Commuter Zone”: Class Divisions in the City

Progressivism, Women, and Urban Reform

Cities of the South and West

Future Directions

Chapter Four: The South

The Rise of the “New South”

The Rise of Jim Crow

The Progressive Movement in the South

Conclusion: National Reconciliation

References

Further reading

Chapter Five: The Midwest and Far West during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Midwest

Politics

The Far West

Conclusion

References

Chapter Six: Environment

References

Further reading

Part II: Sex, Race, and Gender

Chapter Seven: Gender

Popular Culture

Politics and Gender

Labor and Gender

Education and Gender

Physical Appearance

Gender Outliers

The Origins of Gender Ideology in the GAPE

Suggestions for Further Research

Conclusion

References

Chapter Eight: Inventing Sexuality

Gilded Age Tensions and the Last Gasps of Victorianism: Keeping Sex Private and Spheres Separate

Progressive‐Era Trade‐offs and Modern Sexuality: Making Sex Public in an Era of Reform and Consumerism

Conclusion

References

Further reading

Chapter Nine: African Americans

References

Further reading

Chapter Ten: From Dispossessed Wards to Citizen Activists

Indians on the Margins of History

Indians’ Unique “Wardship”

Indians’ Significance for Non‐Indians

Shared Economic History

Shared Cultural History

Indian Progressives

Shared Religious Innovation and Fervor

Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Chapter Eleven: Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity

Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity

Conclusion

References

Part III: Art, Thought, and Culture

Chapter Twelve: Art and Architecture

Nationalism, Transnationalism, and Hegemony

Internal Contexts

Sublime Land

Renaissance Brought Home

A Postwar Culture

Still Americans Abroad?

A Gendered Profession

Art for the People

Malleable Vocabularies

Creators and Organizers

Revolts and Establishments

Chapter Thirteen: Religion in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Renewal and Reaction in the American South

Urbanization and Diversity in the American North

Conquest and Resistance in the American West

Epilogue: Christianity and Imperialism in Progressive‐age America

References

Further Reading

Chapter Fourteen: Journalism

The Attack on Trinity Church

Going Undercover

Socialism and Journalism

Child Labor

The Yellow Press

Lynching and the Black Press

References

Further Reading

Chapter Fifteen: Popular Culture

Narratives of Manipulation and Resistance

From American Exceptionalism to Transatlantic Modernity

Ideology and Utopia in American Culture

Consumer Culture in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Progressives and Popular Culture

Cultural Reach and Homogenization

Future Directions

References

Further Reading

Part IV: Economics, Science, and Technology

Chapter Sixteen: American Capitalism

Capital

Geography

Politics and the State

References

Further reading

Chapter Seventeen: Nonprofit Organizations, Philanthropy, and Civil Society

Nonprofit Organizations

Religious Philanthropy as a Feature of the Gilded Age

Secular Philanthropy in the Progressive Era

Philanthropy and Civil Society in the Progressive Era

References

Chapter Eighteen: Labor and Class in the GAPE

Celebration of “Middle‐Class” Order

Cynicism of the Margins

Transition and Continuity

That Fuzzy “Middle Class”

References

Further Reading

Chapter Nineteen: Science and Technology

References

Further Reading

Chapter Twenty: The Rise of a Modern Concept of “Health”

Professional Medicine

Public Health

The Pharmaceutical Industry

Health and Popular Culture

Conclusion

References

Further Reading

Part V: Political Leadership

Chapter Twenty-One: Gilded Age Presidents

Hayes Administration

Rethinking the Garfield Years

The Surprising Presidency of Chester A. Arthur

More Than Two Nonconsecutive Terms: Competing Interpretations of Grover Cleveland

Revisionism Can Only Go So Far: The Presidency of Benjamin Harrison

A Turning‐Point Presidency: William McKinley and the Rise of Modern America

References

Chapter Twenty-Two: Political Movers and Shakers

The Politics of Populism

Progressivism

Progressivism’s Hiatus

References

Further Reading

Chapter Twenty-Three: Changing Interpretations of Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era

The Heroic Period of Historical Interpretation of Theodore Roosevelt

The Deflation of Theodore Roosevelt’s Reputation

Historians’ Understanding of Theodore Roosevelt and Progressivism from the 1960s Onward

The Effects of the Social History Revolution on Understandings of Progressivism and Theodore Roosevelt

Historiographical Debates about Theodore Roosevelt and US Foreign Policy

Conclusion

References

Chapter Twenty-Four: Woodrow Wilson

Early Life

Progressive Presidency

International Relations

Legacy and Reputation

References

Part VI: Government, Politics, and Law

Chapter Twenty-Five: Pivotal Elections

Gilded Age and Progressive Era Politics

Sectionalism and the Transformation of Political Competition

Elections and the Growth of the American State

Political Parties, Corruption, and Progressive Reform

Presidency‐Centered Parties

Conclusion: Partisanship Beyond the Parties

References

Further Reading

Chapter Twenty-Six: Congress in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

References

Further Reading

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Revising Constitutional History

Framing Gilded and Progressive Era Legal History: The Progressive Synthesis

Revisionism Emerges

Revisionism Elaborated

Revisionism Extended

Revisionism Complicated

Revisionism Challenged

Conclusion

References

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Radicalism and Conservatism

Introduction

1877–1896: The Long Shadow of the Civil War

1890–1914: Progressive Reform

1914–1927: World War I, State Repression, and the Birth of Civil Liberties

Conclusion: Tracing Radicalism and Conservatism Backwards

References

Further Reading

Part VII: The United States and the World

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Connections, Networks, and the Beginnings of a Global America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The New Communications Networks

Cultural Implications of the New Technologies

Progressivism and Transatlantic Reform

Progressive Experts Abroad

Missionaries, Humanitarianism and American Cultural Expansion

Business and Cultural Expansion

Future Research

References

Chapter Thirty: Empire, Expansion, and Its Consequences

Introduction

Imperial Conditions and Imperial Futures

Against Exceptionalism

The Optics of Difference

After the “American Century”

Conclusion: The Paradoxes of Empire

References

Further Reading

Chapter Thirty-One: The United States in the World during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Policing: The Hemisphere, the Colonies, and the Borders

An Interconnected World

The United States in World War I

Directions for Future Research

References

Further Reading

Part VIII: Major Works and Contemporary Relevance

Chapter Thirty-Two: Decades of Upheaval and Reform

Defending the Status Quo

Formulating New Conceptions of Society

Questioning Wealth

Multiple Problems/Multiple Reform Proposals

The West: Final Frontier of Democracy

Science Will Cure the Problems

Bringing Democracy to the World/Defining the American Character

Saving the World

Conclusion

References

Chapter Thirty-Three: Influential Works about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Politics of Synthesis

The Political Economy of the Gilded Age Progressive Era

Radicals and Rebels, Peasants and Populists

The Rise of Segregation and the Fall of Segregated Histories

Feminism: Contemporary and Historiographic

American Imperial Visions

Restoring Democracy to a Democratic Age

References

Chapter Thirty-Four: Why the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Still Matter

References

Further Reading

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 07

Figure 7.1 “Picturesque America, anywhere in the mountains.”

Figure 7.2 Theodore Roosevelt in 1885.

Figure 7.3 Portrait of Viola M., Frontispiece, “Case of a Bearded Woman”.

Guide

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WILEY BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO AMERICAN HISTORY

This series provides essential and authoritative overviews of the scholarship that has shaped our present understanding of the American past. Edited by eminent historians, each volume tackles one of the major periods or themes of American history, with individual topics authored by key scholars who have spent considerable time in research on the questions and controversies that have sparked debate in their field of interest. The volumes are accessible for the non‐specialist, while also engaging scholars seeking a reference to the historiography or future concerns.

PUBLISHED:

A Companion to the American RevolutionEdited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole

A Companion to 19th‐Century AmericaEdited by William L. Barney

A Companion to the American SouthEdited by John B. Boles

A Companion to American Women’s HistoryEdited by Nancy Hewitt

A Companion to American Indian HistoryEdited by Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury

A Companion to Post‐1945 AmericaEdited by Jean‐Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig

A Companion to the Vietnam WarEdited by Marilyn Young and Robert Buzzanco

A Companion to Colonial AmericaEdited by Daniel Vickers

A Companion to American Foreign RelationsEdited by Robert Schulzinger

A Companion to 20th‐Century AmericaEdited by Stephen J. Whitfield

A Companion to the American WestEdited by William Deverell

A Companion to the Civil War and ReconstructionEdited by Lacy K. Ford

A Companion to American TechnologyEdited by Carroll Pursell

A Companion to African‐American HistoryEdited by Alton Hornsby

A Companion to American ImmigrationEdited by Reed Ueda

A Companion to American Cultural HistoryEdited by Karen Halttunen

A Companion to California HistoryEdited by William Deverell and David Igler

A Companion to American Military HistoryEdited by James Bradford

A Companion to Los AngelesEdited by William Deverell and Greg Hise

A Companion to American Environmental HistoryEdited by Douglas Cazaux Sackman

A Companion to Benjamin FranklinEdited by David Waldstreicher

A Companion to World War Two (2 volumes)Edited by Thomas W. Zeiler with Daniel M. DuBois

A Companion to American Legal HistoryEdited by Sally E. Hadden and Alfred L. Brophy

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive EraEdited by Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Edited by

Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger

This edition first published 2017© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Notes on Contributors

Omar H. Ali is Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History and Dean of Lloyd International Honors College at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. A graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, he received his Ph.D. in History from Columbia University and is the author of In the Balance of Power: Independent Black Politics and Third Party Movements in the United States and In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886–1900.

Lloyd E. Ambrosius is Emeritus Professor of History and Samuel Clark Waugh Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition (1987), Wilsonian Statecraft (1990), Wilsonianism (2002), and Woodrow Wilson and American Internationalism (2017). He is past-president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

James M. Beeby is dean of the College of Liberals Arts and professor of history at the University of Southern Indiana. He was previously professor of history and chair at Middle Tennessee State University from 2012–2016, and before that he taught at Indiana University Southeast and West Virginia Wesleyan College. He is the author of Revolt of the Tar Heels: The North Carolina Populist Movement, 1890–1901 (2008) and Populism in the South Revisited (2012). Beeby has published several articles and essays on grass-roots politics, populism, and race relations in the Gilded Age.

Matthew Bowman is the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies and associate professor of religion and history at Claremont Graduate University, and the author most recently of Christian: the Politics of a Word in America (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Kathleen Dalton is a specialist in US history, though she has also taught Chinese and transnational history, gender studies, and world history. She has written articles about Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era, and in 2002 published Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life. As a public historian, she has consulted with the National Park Service and the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library. After teaching at Philips Academy, Andover and Boston University, she is working on a book about Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and their World War I Era Dinner Club. She is especially grateful to E. Anthony Rotundo and Nancy Unger for reading and commenting on this essay.

Justus D. Doenecke is Emeritus Professor of History at New College of Florida. He has written extensively on the Gilded Age; American entry into World War I; the foreign policies of Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Harry S Truman; and isolationism and pacifism from World War I through the early Cold War. Among his books is The Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester A. Arthur (1981). He is grateful to Irwin Gellman, John Belohlavek, and Alan Peskin for their reading of this essay.

Bruce J. Evensen is the Director of the Journalism Program at DePaul University in Chicago. For a decade he was a reporter and bureau chief in the American Midwest, in Washington, DC and in Jerusalem. He’s written and edited several books on journalism history, including Truman, Palestine, and the Press: Shaping Conventional Wisdom at the Beginning of the Cold War (1992); When Dempsey Fought Tunney: Heroes, Hokum and Storytelling in the Jazz Age (1996); God’s Man for the Gilded Age: D. L. Moody and the Rise of Modern Mass Evangelism (2003); The Responsible Reporter: Journalism in the Information Age (2008); and The Encyclopedia of American Journalism History (2007).

Maureen A. Flanagan is Professor of History in the department of humanities at Illinois Institute of Technology. She previously taught at Michigan State University. Flanagan is the author of several books and essays on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, including America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s and Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933. She is working on a manuscript on gender and the built environment of Chicago, Toronto, Dublin, and London from the 1870s to the 1940s.

Julie Greene is Professor of History at the University of Maryland at College Park and the author of several works on transnational labor, empire, and migration, including The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (2009). Her most recent article is “Rethinking the Boundaries of Class: Labor History and Theories of Class and Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History 18 (2), May 2021, 92–112. With Eileen Boris, Heidi Gottfried, and Joo Cheong Tham, Greene is co-editor of the forthcoming Global Labor Migration: New Directions (Illinois, 2022). She is completing a book entitled Box 25: Archival Secrets and the Migratory World of the Panama Canal.

Cristina Viviana Groeger is an Assistant Professor of History at Lake Forest College. Her research explores the history of work, labor markets, and education in the modern United States. Her first book, The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston (Harvard University Press, 2021) was awarded the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize by Harvard University Press for best first book. Her research has been funded by the National Academy of Education / Spencer Foundation, and published in the History of Education Quarterly, The Journal of Urban History, and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Julia Guarneri is Associate Professor of American history at the University of Cambridge. Her book Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans (University of Chicago Press, 2017) was awarded several prizes, including the Eugenia Palmegiano Prize from the American Historical Association. She continues to write on the history of media, while her new research focuses on twentieth-century consumer culture.

Kimberly A. Hamlin is the James and Beth Lewis Professor of History at Miami University and the author of two books: Free Thinker: Sex, Suffrage, and the Extraordinary Life of Helen Hamilton Gardener (2020) and Free Thinker: Darwin, Science, and Women’s Rights in Gilded Age America (2014).

David C. Hammack is Haydn Professor of History Emeritus at Case Western Reserve University. His books include Power and Society: Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (1982), Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader (1998), with Helmut Anheier, A Versatile American Institution: The Changing Ideals and Realities of Philanthropic Foundations (2013), and with Steven R. Smith, AmericanPhilanthropic Foundations: Regional Difference and Change (2018). Hammack holds degrees from Harvard and Columbia universities and Reed College, has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Visiting scholar at Yale and the Russell Sage Foundation. He received both the Distinguished Achievement and Leadership Award of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action, and Case Western Reserve University’s John S. Diekhoff Award for Distinguished Graduate Teaching.

Alexandra (Sasha) Harmon is professor emerita of American Indian Studies and History at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the author of Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound (1998); Rich Indians: Native People and the Problem of Wealth in American History (2010), and Reclaiming the Reservation: Histories of Indian Sovereignty Suppressed and Renewed (2019). She edited The Power of Promises: Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest (2008).

David Huyssen is a Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of York (UK) and Visiting Scholar (2019– 2022) at the J.F.K. Institute for North American Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He specializes in the history of U.S. political economy and urban life, and is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890–1920 (Harvard, 2014).

Brian M. Ingrassia is Assistant Professor of History at West Texas A&M University. He formerly taught at Middle Tennessee State University and Georgia State University. The author of The Rise of Gridiron University: Higher Education’s Uneasy Alliance with Big‐Time Football (2012), Ingrassia has published in The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. He is currently writing a book on automobile racing, urban culture, and the good roads movement in the early 1900s.

Raised in the Midwest, Thomas J. Jablonsky returned to the region in 1995 as a member of Marquette University’s History Department after several decades on the faculty at the University of Southern California. He is the Harry G. John Professor Emeritus of Urban Studies at MU. His scholarship has included books on Chicago and Milwaukee as well as on America’s female anti-suffragists. His recent research focuses upon the biographies of nineteenth century mayors of Los Angeles.

Benjamin Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003), Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (2008), a collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Gusky, and Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive Era Conservation (2017). He also serves as co‐editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.

Robert D. Johnston is Professor of History and Director of the Teaching of History program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He serves as co‐editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His book The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003) won the President’s Book Award of the Social Science History Association. A multiple‐award‐winning teacher, Johnston works extensively with K‐12 teachers in professional development programs.

Michael B. Kahan is the co-director of the Program on Urban Studies at Stanford University, and a Senior Lecturer in Sociology. His interest in the historical transformation of public space has led to publications on topics ranging from the integration of streetcars in the 1850s, to sanitation reform in the 1890s, to the geography of prostitution in the 1910s, to redevelopment in California in the 1990s. He holds a B.A. from Yale and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University and emeritus editor of Dissent magazine. He is the author of seven books, the latest of which is What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party. His books on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era include Barons of Labor: The San Francisco Building Trades and Union Power in the Progressive Era, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan and War Against War: The American Fight for Peace,1914–1918. He is at work on a biography of Samuel Gompers.

Alan Lessoff, University Professor of History, was editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era from 2004 to 2014. Recent books include Where Texas Meets the Sea: Corpus Christi and Its History (2015) and Fractured Modernity: America Confronts Modern Times, 1880s to 1940s, edited with Thomas Welskopp (2012).

Allan E. S. Lumba is assistant professor of history at Virginia Tech. He is the author of Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines (2022). He writes on the entanglements of racial capitalism and colonialisms across the Pacific and Southeast Asia.

Christopher McKnight Nichols is professor of history and Wayne Woodrow Hayes Chair in National Security Studies, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, at the Ohio State University. An Andrew Carnegie Fellow and award-winning scholar and teacher, Nichols is the author or editor of six books, including Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age (2011) and Rethinking American Grand Strategy (2021).

Alan I Marcus is William L. Giles Distinguished Professor and Head, Department of History, Mississippi State University. He is the author or editor of some 22 books and journals and 35 essays covering a wide range of issues and periods. His Malignant Growth: Creating the Modern Cancer Research Establishment, 1875–1915 (2018) and Land of Milk and Money: Creation of the Southern Dairy Industry (2021) are his most recent efforts. He is now turning to an agricultural scientist-centered history of agricultural science in America.

Noam Maggor is a Senior Lecturer in American History at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age, published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” published in the American Historical Review. Noam is currently at work on a project entitled The United States as a Developing Nation: The Political Origins of the Second Great Divergence.

Sidney M. Milkis is the White Burkett Miller Professor of the Department of Politics and Faculty Associate in the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. His books include: The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal (1993); Political Parties and Constitutional Government: Remaking American Democracy (1999); Presidential Greatness (2000), coauthored with Marc Landy; The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776–2014 (2015), 7th edition, coauthored with Michael Nelson; Theodore Roosevelt, the Progressive Party, and the Transformation of American Democracy (2009); and The Politics of Major Policy Reform Since the Second World War, co‐edited with Jeffery Jenkins (2014). He is working on a project that examines the relationship between presidents and social movements.

Karen Pastorello is Emeritus Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at Tompkins Cortland Community College (SUNY). She is the co-author with Susan Goodier of Women Will Vote: Winning Suffrage in New York State (2017). Her other works include The Progressives: Activism and Reform in American Society, 1893–1917 (2014) and A Power Among Them: Bessie Abramowitz Hillman and the Making of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (2008). She is working on a biography of Mary Elizabeth Pidgeon, suffragist and research director for the United States Department of Labor, Women’s Bureau.

Heather Cox Richardson is Professor of History at Boston College. She is the author of a number of books about American politics and economics. Her work explores the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, and the American West, and stretches from the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to the present. In addition to her scholarly work, Richardson writes widely for popular audiences.

Logan Sawyer is the J. Alton Hosch Professor of Law at the University of Georgia and Director of Undergraduate Studies. His scholarship examines the connections between law and political institutions in the 19th and 20th centuries. He earned his JD and PhD in American History from the University of Virginia.

David G. Schuster is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University Fort Wayne, and has taught previously at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul. His interests include the history of American health and culture and the development of a modern healthcare system. His is the author of Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920 (2011).

Anthony Sparacino is a graduate student at the University of Virginia in American Politics. He received his M. A. from the CUNY Graduate Center. His research focuses broadly on issues relating to American political development and American political thought. Of particular interest are the interplay of political parties and the state, the role of elections in political change, as well as the development of the modern conservative movement and conservative political thought.

Mark Wahlgren Summers is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. He has written ten books, including Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion (2000), Party Games (2004), A Dangerous Stir (2009), and Ordeal of the Reunion (2014), all published by the University of North Carolina Press. He is writing a biography of “Big Tim” Sullivan, a New York City boss. He teaches anything that he can get away with.

Ian Tyrrell is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and was Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University in 2010–11. He is the author of Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s MoralEmpire (2010), and Crisis of the Wasteful Nation: Empire and Conservation in Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2015), among other works.

Nancy C. Unger, President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2021–2023, is Professor of History at Santa Clara University. She is the author of the prize-winning biographies Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (2000; revised paperback 2008), and Belle La Follette: Progressive Era Reformer (2016). Her book Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers: American Women in Environmental History (2012), was a California Book Award Finalist. She has published dozens of scholarly essays and articles, and served for eight years as book review editor for the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her multi-media appearances include CNN.com, C-SPAN, NPR, TIME.com, and PBS. She is working on a book on the Diggs and Caminetti cases of 1913, which will examine progressive era efforts to employ the Mann Act to regulate American morals.

Katherine Unterman is Associate Professor of History at Texas A&M University. She is the author of Uncle Sam’s Policemen: The Pursuit of Fugitives across Borders (2015) and numerous articles and essays about legal history and American foreign relations. Her next book project, which examines the long-term impact of the Insular Cases, has received support from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Leigh Ann Wheeler is Professor of History at Binghamton University, former co‐editor of the Journal of Women’s History, and senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia on American History. Her books, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873–1935 (2004) and How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (2013) examine how individuals and movements shaped sexual culture in the modern United States. Her next project examines twentieth‐century episodes in the sexualization of women’s bodies.

Amy Louise Wood is Professor of History at Illinois State University. She is the author of Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890–1940 (2009), which won the Lillian Smith Book Award and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History. Her current book project is entitled, “Sympathy for the Devil: The Criminal in the American Imagination, 1870–1940.”

IntroductionGilded Excesses, Multiple Progressivisms

Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy C. Unger

“In America nearly every man has his dream, his pet scheme, whereby he is to advance himself socially or pecuniarily. It is this all‐pervading speculativeness which we have tried to illustrate in ‘The Gilded Age’,” wrote Mark Twain in the preface to the London Edition of the book which helped to establish the era’s label (Twain and Warner 1873: 451–452). Twain emphasized the individualism, excess, and “shameful corruption” that had infected “every State and every Territory in the Union.” He also held out “faith in a noble future for my country.” Taken together, Twain’s comments suggest some of the period’s worst problems and injustices as well as the characteristic optimism that marked the myriad reforms that developed to address those issues.

By the end of World War I, which concluded the era often referred to by historians as the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (GAPE), the United States was thoroughly transformed domestically and with respect to its global status. A nation that just forty years before had been primarily rural and inward‐looking, still recovering from a devastating civil war, emerged as an urban, industrial giant so convinced of its power and righteousness that it entered the Great War to, in the words of President Woodrow Wilson, “make the world safe for democracy.” In the 1870s, roughly when the GAPE began, most Americans lived as farmers. By its end, most Americans lived in cities, where they worked for wages, purchased rather than raised their food, and depended on civic entities to ensure proper sanitation and a variety of services. This volume chronicles these and related changes and reveals the scholarly debates concerning both the nature of the transformations and their ongoing significance.

Perhaps no period in American history is as fraught with controversy and potential for misunderstanding as “The Gilded Age and Progressive Era.” Even its title is confusing. Historians debate whether the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era should be studied as one long period, or two separate ones, with the Gilded Age (1870s–c. 1900) followed by the Progressive Era (c. 1900–1917), and the latter understood as a sort of antidote to the excesses of the former. This volume begins with a chapter by Heather Cox Richardson in which she explores the importance and substance of the controversy over periodization before presenting an original and intriguing alternative approach to identifying the era.

Generally speaking, however, this Companion, like most recent scholarship, approaches the GAPE as one long period. It examines “Gilded Age” excesses, such as political corruption, challenged by authors in this volume (including Justus Doenecke and Mark Wahlgren Summers), the rise of overcrowded slums (explored by Michael Kahan), and the exploitation of both workers (examined by David Huyssen) and the environment (addressed by Benjamin Johnson). Such extremes were constantly evolving, in part due to interactions with “Progressive Era” initiatives and intended solutions, such as election reform, health and safety regulations, and the conservation of natural resources (discussed particularly in chapters by Karen Pastorello, Sidney Milkis and Anthony Sparacino, and Kathleen Dalton).

The period spanned by the GAPE is one of the most fascinating, important, and instructive eras in American history. The nascent urban, industrial United States of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson serves as an historical and conceptual bridge between the rural, agrarian America of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the current global and technological America of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Progressive giant Robert La Follette claimed that, in this period, “The supreme issue, involving all the others, is the encroachment of the powerful few upon the rights of the many” (La Follette 1913, 760). The progressives were the first ones in US history to tackle the then brand‐new problems of the consolidation of power and encroachments of an influential elite within an urban, industrial society—but they were far from the last. Much can be learned from their ideas, accomplishments, and failures, as well as those of their opponents.

The cutting‐edge scholarly work that makes up this Companion was designed to establish the state of the field. These chapters strive to distill, consolidate, and make sense of past, present, and future directions and interpretive approaches to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This volume brings together scholars of law, race, religion, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies; historians of capitalism, politics, ideas, culture, and urban life; US and world specialists, and many others to provide what is intended to be one of the most complete and up‐to‐date scholarly analyses of the era. The chapters both synthesize past work and also draw on pathbreaking recent and contemporary insights to provide considerable new depth, analytically and historiographically, and to shed new scholarly light on this vital period.

Given the current attention to the present era as a “new Gilded Age,” it now seems all the more necessary to bring together some of the best scholars in the field to take stock of the burgeoning scholarly literature on the GAPE. This Companion is designed to appeal to scholars as well as to undergraduate and graduate students in history by incorporating a wide variety of disciplinary assessments of this period. It seeks to address the questions about the deeper meaning and legacy of this era that abound. For example, just how “gilded” was the Gilded Age component of the GAPE?

In New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905 (2006), in attending to this and related questions, Rebecca Edwards rejects oversimplifications of the era. She argues for characterizing the period as one of many contradictions. Several notable chapters in this volume embrace that complexity in groundbreaking ways, including Julie Greene’s explication of immigration and migration, Christina Groeger’s analysis of conservatism and radicalism in the era, Mathew Bowman’s exploration of patterns in religious and philosophical thought, and Alexandra Harmon’s exploration of Indians in the period. The “who, what, where, and when” of the reform aspects of the GAPE, however, may be even harder to identify. Few scholars, however, have gone as far as Peter Filene, who in 1970 wrote “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement,” in which he claimed that there was no unifying movement or even theme to the various attempts to bring order to this nearly chaotic society.

Most scholars agree that there was a progressive movement, but this consensus splits over the question of just how “progressive” it was. Progressivism is viewed by some as primarily a white urban middle‐class operation designed as a kind of protection against being squeezed out of power by an ever‐growing, increasingly diverse working class on the one hand and the expanding power of big business on the other. Others claim the main source of the movement to have been the workers themselves, while still others credit it to business leaders who were seeking to stabilize volatile conditions through regulation. Progressives have alternately been called altruistic reformers bent on improving the quality of American life (especially for the less advantaged, or so‐called “unprotected”) and selfish condescending meddlers aiming more for social control than social reform.

In a pioneering 1982 essay “In Search of Progressivism,” Daniel Rodgers rejected simple definitions of progressivism, calling for a more plural understanding of progressive ideas set into action. Instead of wading in to find the “essence” of progressivism or to debate how progressive its efforts were, Rodgers emphasized multiple, sometimes overlapping “social languages” of progressivism. These “clusters of ideas,” he argued, revolved around three core groupings: “social efficiency,” the “rhetoric of antimonopolism,” and an “emphasis on social bonds” (Rodgers 1982, 123). This model suggested the “active, dynamic aspect of [progressive] ideas” with shared senses of social ills and potential solutions, and yet progressivism “as an ideology is nowhere to be found.” Many authors in this volume, including Robert Johnston in his chapter assessing patterns of historical interpretation, and most historians, follow elements of this analysis and no longer seek to depict the era in terms of a unitary framework of ideology or politics.

It is the plurality of perspectives and connections within the nation, and beyond it, that scholars now emphasize. The wide range of frequently competing progressive claims (national and international) have tended to be depicted by historians as a cacophony with at least one main focus: being aligned against the social language of the market. Yet this understanding, too, is in the process of revision by historians. Brian Balogh recently observed that consideration should be given to how such appeals and programs adapted to (rather than rejected) the powerful language of market choice in terms of extending the reach of the government into the lives of millions of Americans. At the heart of these developments related to new market conditions was a sprawling debate over the meaning and practices of democracy (Balogh 2015, 62–64, 237).

This Companion builds on such recent insights to delve into the meanings and impacts of the period, an era that seems to mirror—and illuminate—the present and suggests possibilities for the future. For example, was this the formative age for the history of capitalism? In what respects were the hugely successful businessmen of the GAPE (John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie) robber barons or industrial statesmen? How might their legacy shape questions today concerning vastly wealthy entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Larry Ellison, and Charles and David Koch? These and other pressing issues are topics adeptly addressed in the volume by Michael Kazin, David Hammack, and Noam Maggor.

Debates about the dynamics of race, gender, labor, and inequality also emerged in this era, preoccupying scholars, with clear contemporary relevance. For instance, questions about the progressive reformers at the turn of the last century also have application in the twenty‐first. What are the stakes of the often binary critiques of the original (usually white) progressives as being either fairly or unfairly pilloried for their dismal record on racial justice? How should the limits of their reform sensibilities be understood?

Scholars increasingly recognize the individuals and groups who were able to remove some of the worst excesses plaguing American politics and society. Yet historians also emphasize the near‐omnipresence of racism and sexism as well as an embrace of eugenics; many historians mount persuasive critiques of progressives as generally not going further to protect the rights of the many from the powerful few, or of deploying rhetoric that did not match up to their own lived reality. Others focus on the agency of various oppressed minorities and of women who applied progressive ideals to remedy their unequal status. This, after all, was the era in which the nation grappled with how to establish and protect racial equality after the Civil War, which descended into a regime of formal legal racial segregation that was profoundly resisted by people of color. It also was the period in which, after a multigenerational battle, woman suffrage finally became a reality. In view of the era’s dramatic, sometimes contradictory changes at home and abroad, was this a period guided more by confidence in American exceptionalism, or by an appreciation of increasing globalization and exchange? In what ways did the era mark a period of integration, and in what ways is it best characterized as an age of fragmentation?

The thirty‐four chapters in this Companion are organized into eight parts. The first, “Definitions, Precursors, and Geographies,” begins with a provocative analysis of the challenge of defining the GAPE, followed by an examination of the precursors to GAPE reforms. The remaining four chapters in Part I reveal the importance of place in the era. These chapters present an unusual and dynamic mixture of geographies, integrating the West and the Midwest alongside urban America and attending to environmental issues. Although many early studies of the period focused almost exclusively on urban centers, particularly in the Northeast, more recent literature reveals the pervasive national and even international reach of the period’s greatest changes and challenges.

Part II, “Sex, Race, and Gender,” deepens the complexity of the GAPE by examining factors including race, ethnicity, and immigration as well as gender and sexuality. In an economy dependent upon unskilled labor in the factories as well as the fields, old‐stock white Americans struggled to balance their ethnocentrism and racism with the desire for cheap labor. Recent immigrants, like the long‐established populations of Indians and African Americans, sought, with varying degrees of success, to achieve acceptance, citizenship, and equality. Issues of gender as well as sexuality further complicated what it meant to be an American in a time of both rapid social change and stubborn traditionalism.

“Art, Thought, and Culture” form the subjects for the third part of the book. These chapters uncover the breadth and depth of the nation’s transformation as reflected in its art and architecture, religion and philosophy, journalism, and popular culture. Overall the chapters in Part III argue for broad understanding of the profound intellectual and cultural changes sweeping the nation, as well as the impact of journalism and innovations in popular culture that changed the way Americans thought, received information, and spent their free time and discretionary income.

In the fourth part, “Economics, Science, and Technology,” contributors examine the ways in which business and capitalism combined with science, technology, and medicine to turn the previously rural, agrarian America into an urban industrial nation. Investigations into resultant issues of labor and class as well as philanthropy demonstrate the challenges faced by the industrial labor force as well as the various private and public efforts to remedy extreme GAPE disparities in wealth.

“Political Leadership,” the subject of Part V, focuses on GAPE political leaders, including the period’s less celebrated presidents examined in a chapter that adds particular depth to the members of this group who have conventionally been dismissed as do‐nothings. Chapters in this part are also devoted to the period’s two most iconic chief executives, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and trace the cycles of critical response to their administrations. An additional chapter evaluates a variety of other leaders at the local, state, and national level, many of whom acquired power and wielded influence in non‐traditional ways.

The sixth part of the book explores “Government, Politics, and the Law,” with fresh interpretations of the political transformations of the era. It begins with a chapter on the pivotal national elections of the period—1876, 1896, 1912, and (to a lesser extent) 1920— and another on people and events in Congress. Together these chapters reveal how both major and seemingly minor political episodes combined to culminate in a new form of executive‐centered partisanship, which continues to shape political parties and campaigns in the United States. As one of the chapters illuminates, the judiciary’s understanding of liberty in the GAPE was shaped by free labor and equal‐rights ideologies, extended and complicated by new questions about race, gender, religion, citizenship, and institutional developments, with important implications for the development of modern liberalism and conservatism. A final chapter caps Part VI by establishing that GAPE “radicalism” and “conservatism” must be understood in relation to each other. This chapter traces the foremost political and social movements that defined the outer limits of political possibility between Reconstruction and the 1920s.

In Part VII, three chapters open up new vistas onto the burgeoning and complicated landscape of the “US and the World.” A cutting‐edge historical approach to developing networks, connections, and exchanges helps to reveal the depth to which the US was embedded in what many in the era perceived as an integrated, transnational “global civilization.” In turn, increasing international engagement propelled the US toward expansion, empire, and war, with unforeseen consequences. The United States assumed greater international police power (particularly within the Western hemisphere), became a force in international law, and eventually joined in World War I. This section follows the latest scholarly insights to characterize the GAPE as an age of globalization and greater interconnectedness, leading to new transnational social movements and dramatic changes in US foreign relations.

The final part of the book—on influences and relevance—comprises three succinct, discerning chapters exploring some of the most influential works of the era (novels, nonfiction, journalism, and more), some of the most influential historical works and interpretations about the era (historiography), and demonstrates the period’s contemporary relevance.

The social, economic, political, intellectual, racial, religious, and diplomatic transformations from the end of the Civil War through World War I—the Gilded Age and Progressive Era—served to make America modern. These changes, in turn, shaped subsequent attempts to grapple with some of the most pressing issues related to equality and pluralism in a diverse, ever‐changing, stratified, newly industrial society.

Much has happened that highlights the ongoing resonance of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (GAPE) since this book’s original publication. Following the election of Donald Trump, scandals and corruption at the highest levels of government and business increased, along with rising economic inequality. Many pundits declared a “new Gilded Age,” a concept introduced early in the second decade of this century and evaluated in the book’s final chapter by Michael Kazin.

The killing of George Floyd, a man of color, by a white police officer on May 25, 2020, starkly revealed one of the greatest failures of the GAPE and American society more broadly. Instead of incorporating racial justice more fully into progressive reform agendas, the GAPE is marked by the institutionalization and legalization of racism, dramatically revealed by the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision (1896) in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the “separate but equal” doctrine. In the ensuing decades, despite valiant efforts by civil rights activists, Congress failed to pass anti-lynching legislation nearly 200 times, and the filibuster was increasingly used in the U.S. Senate as a means of blocking civil rights laws.

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement also provides echoes of the GAPE. As Omar Ali points out in his chapter on African Americans, resistance to the nation’s racism took a variety of important and innovative forms. He concludes his essay asking: “Does employing the concept of race help or hinder our understanding of people and their societies in the past?” Ongoing racial violence and the responses to it help to answer that question as they reveal the powerful legacies of race, racism, and assumptions about whiteness formalized in the GAPE.

The COVID-19 pandemic has eerily mirrored the 1918-19 influenza pandemic that killed an estimated 675,000 Americans, ravaging the U.S. and the world. Then, as now, pandemic crisis highlights fissures and fractures in society— regarding race and inequality, but also trust in government and experts, political polarization, and the willingness of leaders to make difficult decisions. The emerging conception of “community health,” examined by David Schuster, was essential to pandemic responses, including “by-passing new regulatory legislation.” Similar strategies were employed in 1918 and 2020, involving familiar non-pharmaceutical interventions such as closures, gathering limits, social distancing, quarantines, masking and hand hygiene. Unlike in the Progressive Era, pushback on interventions has become intensely politicized; as a partial result, the U.S. has suffered a staggering number of deaths (over 900,000 reported COVID deaths at the time of publication). The present population is far larger, but also enjoys a far better public health infrastructure as well as the benefits of modern medical knowledge. In 1918-19 people were eager for treatments and vaccines, but science and medicine came up with none; in 2020-21 vaccine skepticism, mis-information, disinformation, and unequal access, particularly worldwide, have stymied governments and societies. All of which hearkens back to one of the most compelling questions of the GAPE: how best to reform to build a better future? As Maureen Flanagan concludes, it is imperative that we continue to develop “new ideas about the nature of a good democratic society and the role that all individuals need to play in its construction.”

References

Balogh, Brian. 2015.

The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century

. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Edwards, Rebecca. 2006.

New Spirits: Americans in the “Gilded Age,” 1865–1905

. New York: Oxford University Press.

Filene, Peter G. 1970. “An Obituary for the Progressive Movement.”

American Quarterly

22, 1: 20–34.

La Follette, Belle Case. 1913. “Segregation in the Civil Service.”

La Follette’s Magazine

5, 50: 6.

Rodgers, Daniel T. 1982. “In Search of Progressivism.”

Reviews in American History

10: 113–132.

Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner. 1873b.

The Gilded Age: A Novel

. Hartford: American Publishing Co.

Part IOverview‐Definitions, Precursors, and Geographies

Chapter OneReconstructing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Heather Cox Richardson

No one today is quite sure what time period the Gilded Age and Progressive Era covers. It sprawls somewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but few historians can agree on where its edges lie. Some argue for a period that begins in 1865 with the end of the Civil War, or in 1873, with economic overproduction, or in 1877, with the alleged death of Reconstruction (Schneirov 2006). The end of the era is even more problematic. Perhaps the period ended in 1898, when the Spanish–American War launched the nation into imperialism, or in 1901, with the ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, or in 1917 with the outbreak of World War I or in 1918, with its end. There is even a good argument that it might stretch all the way to the Stock Market Crash in October 1929 (Edwards 2009, 464). In trying to section off the late nineteenth century in America, there is also the problem of figuring out where the Gilded Age and Progressive Era overlaps with the period termed Reconstruction, which everyone agrees was also crucial to the rise of modern America.

Even the names Gilded Age and Progressive Era make historians chafe. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today in 1873, but the name was not then applied to the era. It was only in the early twentieth century that critics trying to create what one called a usable past, men such as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, called the era from the 1870s to 1900 the Gilded Age. Their intent was to indict the post‐Civil War materialism they despised, although Twain and Warner wrote their book to highlight the political corruption they insisted characterized the early 1870s. The twentieth‐century part of the equation labeled the Progressive Era comes by its moniker more honestly, for contemporaries did, in fact, call themselves and their causes Progressive. But the label was hardly new to the twentieth century.