Download or read book Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age written by T. Adams Upchurch and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2009-04-13 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gilded Age was an important three-decade period in American history. It was a time of transition, when the United States began to recover from its Civil War and post-war rebuilding phase. It was as a time of progress in technology and industry, of regression in race relations, and of stagnation in politics and foreign affairs. It was a time when poor southerners began farming for a mere share of the crop rather than for wages, when pioneers settled in the harsh land and climate of the Great Plains, and when hopeful prospectors set out in search of riches in the gold fields out West. The Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age relates the history of the major events, issues, people, and themes of the American "Gilded Age" (1869-1899). This period of unprecedented economic growth and technical advancement is chronicled in this reference and includes a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries.
Download or read book Death in the Haymarket written by James Green and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On May 4, 1886, a bomb exploded at a Chicago labor rally, wounding dozens of policemen, seven of whom eventually died. A wave of mass hysteria swept the country, leading to a sensational trial, that culminated in four controversial executions, and dealt a blow to the labor movement from which it would take decades to recover. Historian James Green recounts the rise of the first great labor movement in the wake of the Civil War and brings to life an epic twenty-year struggle for the eight-hour workday. Blending a gripping narrative, outsized characters and a panoramic portrait of a major social movement, Death in the Haymarket is an important addition to the history of American capitalism and a moving story about the class tensions at the heart of Gilded Age America.
Download or read book Securing the Fruits of Labor written by James L. Huston and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Huston has undertaken a unique and Herculean labor in examining American beliefs about wealth distribution over one and a half centuries. His findings have led him to a startling conclusion: Americans' earliest economic attitudes were formed during the Revolutionary period and remained virtually unchanged until the close of the nineteenth century. Why those attitudes existed and persisted, how they informed public debate, and what caused their ultimate demise are among the channels explored in Securing the Fruits of Labor, a grand excursion into waters of economic history only glimpsed by previous works.
Download or read book A Historical Guide to Mark Twain written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and published by Historical Guides to American Authors. This book was released on 2002 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain is still one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. In this guide to Twain, his life and times and the historical context in which he operated Shelley Fisher Fishkin assembles original essays by leading scholars that describe and define the man.
Download or read book Daily Life in the Industrial United States 1870 1900 written by Julie Husband and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2019-06-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Not just about the rise of the factories or the emergence of the modern city, this fascinating history conveys how it felt to work the assembly line and walk the bustling urban streets. Daily Life in the Industrial United States: 1870–1900 is a narrative-based social history that is ideal for college and high school students researching this era. Thematically organized chapters, devoted to Economic Life, Domestic Life, Recreational Life, and other themes, are broad in scope but include primary documents and telling details that give readers a visceral sense of the lives of people who lived during the era of industrialization. Primary documents range from first-person diaries of individuals who lived during the era, to letters from freed slaves looking to reunite with relatives sold away from them, to speeches and essays by activists including Frederick Douglass and Jane Addams. They reveal how people understood the goals of education, the legal position of African Americans in the South, and marriage, among many other daily phenomena. Readers will become privy to a range of personal experiences while comprehending the importance of the economic and social developments of the period. A chronology, a glossary, a selection of illustrations, and further reading sources complete the work.
Download or read book Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality written by Edward O'Donnell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.
Download or read book Listening to Nineteenth Century America written by Mark M. Smith and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Arguing for the importance of the aural dimension of history, Mark M. Smith contends that to understand what it meant to be northern or southern, slave or free--to understand sectionalism and the attitudes toward modernity that led to the Civil War--we must consider how antebellum Americans comprehended the sounds and silences they heard. Smith explores how northerners and southerners perceived the sounds associated with antebellum developments including the market revolution, industrialization, westward expansion, and abolitionism. In northern modernization, southern slaveholders heard the noise of the mob, the din of industrialism, and threats to what they considered their quiet, orderly way of life; in southern slavery, northern abolitionists and capitalists heard the screams of enslaved labor, the silence of oppression, and signals of premodernity that threatened their vision of the American future. Sectional consciousness was profoundly influenced by the sounds people attributed to their regions. And as sectionalism hardened into fierce antagonism, it propelled the nation toward its most earsplitting conflict, the Civil War.
Download or read book Constitutional Context written by Kathleen S. Sullivan and published by Johns Hopkins University Press+ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative reassessment of the 19th century American women’s movement calls into question its attack on common law traditions. While the United States was founded on principles of freedom and equality, its legal traditions are based in British common law. In the nineteenth-century, women’s rights advocates argued that this led to a contradiction: common law rules concerning property and the status of married women were at odds with the nation’s principles. Conventional wisdom suggests that this tactic was successful. But in Constitutional Context, historian Kathleen S. Sullivan offers a fresh perspective. In revisiting the era’s congressional debates, state legislation, judicial opinions, news accounts, and work of political activists, Sullivan finds that the argument for universal, abstract rights was not the only—or even the best—path available for social change. Rather than establishing a new paradigm of absolute rights, the women’s movement unwittingly undermined common law’s ability to redress grievances. This contributed to the social, cultural, and political stagnation that characterizes the movement today. A challenging and thoughtful study of what is commonly thought of as an era of progress, Constitutional Context provides the groundwork for a more comprehensive understanding and interpretation of constitutional law.
Download or read book Tramps Unfit Mothers and Neglected Children written by Sherri Broder and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2010-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In late Victorian America few issues held the public's attention more closely than the allegedly unnatural family life of the urban poor. In Tramps, Unfit Mothers, and Neglected Children, Sherri Broder brings new insight to the powerful depictions of the urban poor that circulated in newspapers and novels, public debate and private correspondence, including the irresponsible tramp, the "fallen" single mother, and the neglected child. Broder considers how these representations contributed to debates over the nature of family life and focuses on the ways different historical actors—social reformers, labor activists, and ordinary laboring people—made use of the available cultural narratives about family, gender, and sexuality to comprehend changes in turn-of-the-century America. In the decades after the Civil War, Philadelphia was an important center of charity, child protection, and labor reform. Drawing on the rich records of the Pennsylvania Society to Protect Children from Cruelty, Broder assesses the intentions and consequences of reform efforts devoted to women and children at the turn of the century. Her research provides an eloquent study of how the terms used by social workers and their clients to discuss the condition of poverty continue to have a profound influence on social policies and develops a complex historical perspective on how social policy and representations of poor families have been and remain mutually influential.
Download or read book Teamsters in the Gilded Age written by Timothy Messer-Kruse and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Capital City written by Thomas Kessner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-04-07 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, New York City was an undistinguished town, competing with Philadelphia and Boston to be America's dominant port city. Just two generations later, it had built itself into the country's powerhouse center of trade and finance, rivaled only by London as financial capital of the world. In Capital City, Thomas Kessner tells the story of this remarkable transformation. With the advantages of its famous harbor and the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, New York became the chief commercial center for the growing nation. As the shipping industry prospered, capital accumulated, and a growing banking center emerged, New York went on to finance the Union cause during the Civil War, open the West to development, and consolidate the national railroad system. The city's energy and opportunity attracted ambitious men from all over the country whose names became synonymous with big business: Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan. New York's banks set the interest rates for the nation, its stock exchange fixed the price of securities, its investors transformed American business from family-owned enterprises into modern corporations, and its growing political clout catapulted public figures, such as Samuel Tilden and Teddy Roosevelt, onto the national stage. Combining political and urban history with a colorful cast of characters, Capital City chronicles how Gotham's Gilded Age reshaped the metropolis and the nation as it molded our present-day economy.
Download or read book The Constitution Besieged written by Howard Gillman and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Constitution Besieged offers a compelling reinterpretation of one of the most notorious periods in American constitutional history. In the decades following the Civil War, federal and state judges struck down as unconstitutional a great deal of innovative social and economic legislation. Scholars have traditionally viewed this as the work of a conservative judiciary more interested in promoting laissez-faire economics than in interpreting the Constitution. Howard Gillman challenges this scholarly orthodoxy by showing how these judges were in fact observing a long-standing constitutional prohibition against "class legislation." By reviewing unfamiliar state cases and legal commentary, and by providing fresh interpretations of familiar Supreme Court cases, Gillman uncovers a fascinating - and long forgotten - legal tradition. In this richly textured historical narrative, we see how American judges once worked to insure that legislative power be used only to promote the public good, and not to benefit certain classes or burden their market competitors. Beyond shedding new light on this jurisprudence, Gillman also links it to larger debates in the political system, debates traced to concerns about factional politics expressed by the country's founders and to the Jacksonian assault on special privileges. This tradition came under siege with the intensification of class conflict at the turn of the century, and Gillman carefully documents its demise. He details how industrialization undermined assumptions about the fairness of capitalist social relations, and how this led increasing numbers of people to question the requirement that the state remain neutral in matters of class conflict - thus leaving it to a stalwart judiciary to protect "a Constitution besieged." A major contribution to an understanding of this important period in the history of the Supreme Court, Gillman's work stands as a landmark in revisionist accounts of the "Lochner era." Gillman's study represents the kind of paradigm-shift that will undoubtedly affect a wide range of scholarly activity for some time to come. The broad scope of this work makes it essential reading for those interested in American political thought, the development of the American state, the relationship between law and social change, and contemporary debates about the original intent of the framers of the Constitution and the proper role of the judiciary in American politics.
Download or read book The Forgotten Revolution written by Judith A. Merkle and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 1046 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Invisible Handcuffs of Capitalism written by Michael Perelman and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mainstream economics ignores or distorts the most fundamental aspect of this reality: that the vast majority of people must, out of necessity, labor on behalf of others, transformed into nothing but a means to the end of maximum profits for their employers. The nature of the work we do and the conditions under which we do it profoundly shape our lives. And yet, both of these factors are peripheral to mainstream economics. By sweeping labor under the rug, mainstream economists hide the nature of capitalism, making it appear to be a system based upon equal exchange rather than exploitation inside every workplace.
Download or read book Management and Ideology written by Judith A. Merkle and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its obscure beginning as a system for organizing machine shops, Scientific Management has grown into the major technocratic ideology of the twentieth century. Its development and international diffusion have influenced industrial productivity, the social fabric of industrial society, and even the nature of government. In this study of the movement's growth, Merkle compares the writings of the American, German, French, British, and Soviet vanguards of Scientific Management and finds that those who advocated efficiency engineering were considerably more than pragmatists seeking immediate technical solutions to production problems. Rather, they were visionaries who sought to reconcile class conflict, restructure government, and create a universal technocratic utopia by achieving efficient mass production and rationalized distribution. The call for a "mental revolution," which permeates their writings, found sympathizers among capitalists and socialists alike; that revolution affected not only the structure of modern industrialism but also the organization of the state itself. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.
Download or read book Beyond Labor s Veil written by Robert E. Weir and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor was founded in 1869 as a secret fraternal order committed to the goal of uniting American labor. At its height in 1886, the Knights claimed the allegiance of perhaps a million workers. Despite a host of local studies by the new labor historians of the 1970s and 1980s, there has been no general study of the Knights since Norman Ware's 1929 book, and no one has ever attempted a comprehensive study of the culture of the organization. In Beyond Labor's Veil, Robert E. Weir presents a fascinating cultural portrait of the Knights across regions, covering the years 1869 to 1893. From the start, the Knights of Labor was an unusual organization, equal parts fraternal order and labor union. It was the only nineteenth-century labor organization to organize African Americans, women, and unskilled workers on an equal basis with white craftsmen. Weir goes beyond the rhetoric of public pronouncements and union politics to consider the real influence of the Knights--in communities and homes as well as in the workplace. Weir explores the many cultural expressions of the Knights--ritual, religion, poetry, music, literature, material objects, graphics, and leisure. Although the Knights barely survived into the twentieth century, Weir concludes that the creative cultural expressions of the Knights enabled it to do as well as it did in the face of powerful oppositional forces. What emerges in Beyond Labor's Veil is a rich, detailed description of the Knights as its members adapted to the confusion and contradiction of America's Gilded Age.
Download or read book To Enlarge the Machinery of Government written by Williamjames Hull Hoffer and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2007-09-17 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the federal government change from the weak apparatus of the antebellum period to the large, administrative state of the Progressive Era? To Enlarge the Machinery of Government explores the daily proceedings of the U.S. House and Senate from 1858 to 1891 to find answers to this question. Through close readings of debates centered around sponsorship, supervision, and standardization recorded in the Congressional Globe and Congressional Record during this period, Williamjames Hull Hoffer traces a critical shift in ideas that ultimately ushered in Progressive legislation: the willingness of American citizens to allow, and in fact ask for, federal intervention in their daily lives. He describes this era of congressional thought as a "second state," distinct from both the minimalist approaches that came before and the Progressive state building that developed later. The "second state" era, Hoffer contends, offers valuable insight into how conceptions of American uniqueness contributed to the shape of the federal government.
