H-SHGAPE Bibliographical Essays: An Overview of the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era
An Overview of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by
Ballard Campbell
From: IN%"H-SHGAPE@H-NET.MSU.EDU" "H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List" 4-DEC-1998 23:08:05.80
To: IN%"H-SHGAPE@H-NET.MSU.EDU" "Recipients of H-SHGAPE digests"
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Subj: H-SHGAPE Digest - 3 Dec 1998 to 4 Dec 1998
Date: Fri, 4 Dec 1998 15:46:00 -0500
From: "Ballard Campbell, H-SHGAPE"
Subject: GAPEBIB: Campbell on the GAPE
An Overview of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by
Ballard C. Campbell
December 4, 1998
Dear readers,
Recently I prepared a short bibliography on the GAPE years to
accompany an anthology on the period that I prepared. In a sense,
the bibliography represents a short course in the literature
about the GAPE, from one person's perspective.
Feel free to write the list with substitutions, additions, and
other responses to these reading suggestions.
Ballard C. Campbell
Good starting places to explore the Gilded Age and Progressive
Era are Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United
States, 1877-1919 (Norton, 1987), and John W. Chambers,
The Tryanny of Change: America in the Progressive Era,
1890-1920 (New York: St. Martin's, 1992). The latter volume
contains an extensive bibliography. Ray Ginger, Age of Excess:
The United States from 1877 to 1914 (New York: Macmillan,
1965) provides a colorful statement of the period written from a
critical point of view. Samuel Hays, The Response to
Industrialism, 1877-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1957) and Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order,
1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967) are influential
interpretations. Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social
Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1991) interprets the period from the
perspective of economic class and gender. Charles W. Calhoun,
The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America
(Wilington, DE: Scholarly Resources, Inc, 1996) contains fourteen
chapters on topics about the late nineteenth century. John Milton
Cooper, Jr. Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), offers a readable overview of the
early twentieth century.
Economic change in the Gilded Age is surveyed in Fred A. Shannon,
The Farmer's Last Frontier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New
York: Harper and Row, 1945), Edward C. Kirkland, Industry
Comes of Age: Business, Labor, and Public Policy, 1860-1897
(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, Inc, 1961), and Walter
Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). An interesting
supplement to these studies is Ruth S. Cowan, A Social History
of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997). Glenn Porter, The Rise of Big Business, 1860-1920,
second edition (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc.,
1992), is a superb introduction to the growth of corporations and
changes in the economy. A more comprehensive survey of the
subject is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The
Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1977). The processing and distribution
of basic commodities in the nation's midsection is the subject of
William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), a book that is well
written and informative.
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American
Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co.,
1934) is the classic indictment of the great entrepreneurs of the
Gilded Age. Ron Chernow takes a more balanced view of these
gaints of industry in Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller,
Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), and The House of
Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern
Finance (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990). The reader
can ride the rails vicariously in Albro Martin, Railroads
Triumphant: The Growth, Rejection, and Rebirth of a Vital
American Force (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Melvyn Dubofsky, Industrialism and the American Worker,
1865-1920, third edition (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson,
Inc., 1996) is a succinct overview of workers in the period
between Reconstruction and the Great War. Other illuminating
studies of labor include David Montgomery, The Fall of the
House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor
Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1987); Walter Licht, Working for the Railroad: The
Organization of Work in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983); and Alexander Keyssar, Out
of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Patterns of life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era are etched
in Hal S. Baron, Mixed Harvest: The Second Great
Transformation in the Rural North, 1870-1930 (Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); John S. Gileson,
Middle-Class Providence, 1820-1940 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1986); Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988); Thomas J.
Schlereth, Victorian America: Transformations in Everday Life,
1876-1915 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991); and, Jessica H.
Foy and Thomas Schlereth, eds., American Home Life, 1880-1930:
A Social History of Spaces and Services (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1992). The commercialization of
leisure is examined in Steven A. Reiss, Sport in Industrial
America, 1850-1920 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc.,
1995).
The epic saga of the peopling of America is told by Roger
Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and
Ethnicity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990).
The diversity of immigrant groups and ethnic culture is revealed
in John E. Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants
in Urban America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1985); Timothy J. Meagher, ed., From Paddy to Studs: Irish
American Communities in the Turn of the Century Era, 1880 to
1920 (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Judith Smith,
Family Connections: A History of Italian and Jewish Lives in
Providence, Rhode Island, 1900-1940 (Albany, NY: State
University of New York Press, 1985). Biographical studies of two
key figures in the African-American community discloses many
dimensions of its history; see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T.
Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972, 1983, 2
vols.), and David L. Lewis, W.E.B. DuBois - Biography of a
Race, 1868-1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993). James Borchest,
Alley Life in Washington : Family, Community, Religion &
Folklife in the City 1850-1970 (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1980) offers an revealing portrait of everyday
life among blacks and whites in the nation’s Capital.
Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in
America (New York: Basic Books, 1984), examined how men and
women formed family bonds, while Mark C. Carnes, Meanings for
Manhood: Construction of Masculinity in Victorian America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) focused on gender
roles. The adaption of women to changes in American society can
be sampled in Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures:
Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department
Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1986); Deborah Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in
Rural Nebraska, 1880-1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1991); and David Kennedy, Birth Control in
America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1970). Two women who led important crusades,
one against liquor and other to protect consumers, are portrayed
in Ruth Bordin, Francis Willard: A Biography (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986), and Kathryn Kish
Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of
Women's Political Culture, 1830-1900 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1995). Linda Gordon's Pitied But Not
Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-
1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994) argues that conflicts along
class, partisan, and gender lines marked efforts to aid poverty.
Robert W. Cherny, American Politics in the Gilded Age,
1868-1900 (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1997) is a
solid introduction to politics in the generation after the Civil
War. A classic commentary on government in Gilded Age America is
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (New York:
Macmillan Co., 1890, 2 vol. or later editions); despite its age,
the work retains surprizing utility. H. Wayne Morgan, From
Hayes to Mckinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1969) is a
comprehensive account of presidential elections and
administrations. The dynamics of popular politics is examined in
Richard J. Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and
Political Conflicts, 1888-1896 (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1971); Paula Baker, Moral Frameworks of Public
Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York,
1870-1930 (New York: Oxford, 1991); J. Morgan Kousser, The
Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the
Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven,
CN: Yale University Press, 1974); Paul Kleppner, Continuity
and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893-1928 (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1987); John M Allswang, A House For All
Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890-1936 (Lexington,
KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1971). The Populist challenge
to the major parties is the subject of Robert C. McMath, Jr.,
American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1993).
Reform is a dominant theme of politics in the early twentieth
century. Changes in public life during the era is skillfully
summarized in Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick,
Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davison,
Inc., 1983). Important interpretations of progressivism include
Richard Hofstandter, The Age of Reform (New York: Random
House, 1955); Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservativism
(Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1963); and Richard L. McCormick,
From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York
State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
Morton Keller's volumes constitute a monumental survey of public
policy and government during the Gilded Age and Progressivism:
Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century
America (1997), Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy
and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933 (1990), and
Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in
America, 1900-1933 (1944), all published by Harvard
University Press (Cambridge, MA). Ballard C. Campbell, The
Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era
to the Present (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1995), placed the Gilded Age and Progressive Era within broad
dimensions of change in the American political tradition. Jon C.
Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America,
1870-1900 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1984) documented the enormous contributions that urban officials
made to life in the late nineteenth century. Conflicts over
social policies divided many communities in the decades around
1900, a point made clear in James C. Mohr, Abortion in
America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy,
1800-1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); David J.
Pivar, Purity Crusade: Sexual Morality and Social Control
(Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1973); William O'Neill,
Divorce in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1967); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers:
The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
The presidents have attracted more scholarly attention than any
other political subject concerning America, except possibly war.
Solid studies of the presidents include Allan Nevins, Grover
Cleveland: A Study in Courage (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.,
1932); Allan Peskin, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State
University Press, 1978:); Lewis Gould, The Presidency of
William McKinley (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press,
1980); and Alexander S. George and Juliette L. George, Woodrow
Wilson and Colonel House: A Personality Study (New York:
Dover Publications, 1964). Most presidents are the subject of
several biographies, some published in several volumes. The
American National Biography (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999, 20 volumes) cites the most important literature
about each president, in addition to a full sketch. This
collection also contains biographical essays and references about
notable women and men from all walks of life.
America's venture into world affairs during the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era included the participations in two wars. The
first conflict is discussed in Gerald F. Linderman, The Mirror
of War: American Society and the Spanish-American War (1974);
David F. Trask, The War with Spain in 1898 (New York:
Macmillan, 1981); and Stuart Creighton Miller, "Benevolent
Assimilation": The American Conquest of the Phillippines,
1899-1903 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). The Cuban
intervention in 1898 triggered a new level of American activity
in the Caribbean, which is the subject of Lester Langley, The
Banana Wars: United States Intervention in the Caribbean,
1898-1934 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985).
Regarding the second military engagement one may consult Ross
Gregory, The Origins of American Intervention in the First
World War (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1971); and Thomas
J. Knock, To End All Wars: Woodrow Wilson and the Creation of
the League of Nations (New York: Oxford University Press,
1992). The home front during the Great War is the subject of
David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American
Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
