The Ordeal of Eugene Debs

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Reynolds Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Fiscal Policy ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The South ◽  
Panic Of 1893 ◽  
Labor Conflicts ◽  
General Strike ◽  
The U.S

The American panic of 1893 has its origins in the fiscal policy of the U.S. Congress. Within a year, the 1893 panic ushered in one of the most famous labor conflicts in American history. The American Railway Union's support for workers locked out of the Pullman Palace Car Company became a titanic general strike centered in Chicago. What began as international doubt about the dollar's convertibility into gold became by 1894 a test of Eugene Debs' new American Railway Union, then an abortive strike, then a collapse of the traditional two-party system. This story is often told differently by political scientists, labor historians, and scholars of socialism, the South, or the transition from the Gilded Age to the Progressive era. This chapter attempts to put some of those histories and historiographies together.

Why We Might Just Be Living in a Second “Progressive” Era

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-263
Author(s):  
Eli Cook
Keyword(s):  
Income Inequality ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Historical Analogy

AbstractThe recent framing of our current era as a “Second Gilded Age” has been closely linked to economist Thomas Piketty's empirical findings regarding income inequality patterns in American history. Yet if we take a closer look at both the inequality data at our disposal as well as the broader social forces that have led to widening wealth gaps in recent decades, it becomes apparent that our current neoliberal era of rising inequality is far more similar to the Progressive Era than the Gilded Age. After arguing why the Progressive Era is a more apt historical analogy, this article will seek to explain why our contemporary moment has nonetheless been framed as a Second Gilded Age.

Comparative Perspectives on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ballard Campbell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
International Perspective ◽  
Comparative Approach ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Business Politics

Thanks to Richard Jensen, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Alan Lessoff and William G. Shade for helpful comments on this essay.Comparative perspectives on the United States have received increased attention in recent years, stimulated apparently by the rise in world history's popularity. David Thelen's sponsorship of transnational history as a subject of three special issues of the Journal of American History no doubt has contributed to the trend. The reprinting of C. Vann Woodward's The Comparative Approach to American History in 1997, the publication of George Fredrickson's essays on comparative history, and the report of the La Pietra Project reflect recent efforts to put United States history in an international perspective. While comparative history hardly has gained equal footing with nationally-centered studies, enough work on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era has appeared over the last decade and a half to warrant an assessment. This essay takes note of scholarship on economics, business, politics and governance that has examined the United States within an international context during the 1870s–1914 era. My objective is to discern trends in the literature and suggest opportunities for future research rather than to provide a comprehensive bibliographical survey.

Being the ‘Other’: Teaching U.S. History as a Fulbright Professor in Egypt

2002 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 347-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maureen A. Flanagan
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Western History ◽  
University Curriculum ◽  
World Vision ◽  
University History ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
The U.S

If for Russell Johnson the experience of teaching the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in Turkey was that of being in a “not so strange land,” my four months as a Fulbright professor at the University of Alexandria in Egypt were often quite the opposite. There I was truly a stranger in a strange land. But it is important to note right from the start that by strange I mean foreign in the sense that American history of any sort is not part of the Egyptian university curriculum. So much so that before I arrived in Egypt I had been given only a hazy idea of what I might be teaching. Once there I quickly found that I had to jettison the proposal that I had submitted for the Fulbright competition – to teach about the processes and ideas of democracy in U.S. history, most especially in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The reasons for my inability to teach what I had proposed help explain much about the place of U.S. history, indeed all of “western” history, in Egyptian universities, and how the situation differs enormously from those described for Canada, Mexico, and Turkey. In these “post-eleventh September” days, it seems to me especially important to understand that while in the U.S. we seek to expand our university history curricula into a world vision, in Egypt exactly the opposite has been happening. Why this should be so in the age of globalization, and what lessons it has for U.S. historians, I think are among the valuable insights that can be gained from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in the Arab world.

The Encounter between Jews and America in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2012 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hasia Diner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
Mass Migration ◽  
Basic Characteristics ◽  
American Society

The period after 1870 through the middle of the 1920s, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, coincided with the mass migration of Jews to the United States. Nearly three million Jews, primarily from eastern Europe, overwhelmed the numerically small Jewish community already resident in America. Of the Jews who left Europe in those years, approximately 85 percent opted for the United States, a society that took some of its basic characteristics from the particular developments of this transitional historical period. This essay focuses on five aspects of Gilded Age and Progressive Era America and their impact on the Jews. These features of American society both stimulated the mass migration and made possible a relatively harmonious, although complicated, integration. Those forces included the broader contours of immigration, the nation's obsession with race, its vast industrial and economic expansion, its valorization of religion, and its two-party system in which neither the Democrats or the Republicans had any stake in demonizing the growing number of Jewish voters.

Culture Wars: The U.S. Art Lobby and Congressional Tariff Legislation during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert E. May
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Congressional Debates ◽  
Art Community ◽  
Art Pedagogy ◽  
The U.S

From 1883 to World War I, disputes over art tariffs roiled America's art community, drawing preeminent painters, sculptors, architects, and illustrators into national lobbying campaigns. This essay exposes artists’ agency in tariff politics, illuminates their ideologies, and explains congressional debates, legislation, and diplomacy regarding U.S. art schedules, while demonstrating how the art tariff imbroglio often challenged longstanding partisan patterns in Washington with respect to tariff protectionism. It also contributes to Atlantic world studies by exploring how artists’ anti-tariff positions derived from transoceanic systems of art pedagogy and exhibitions and by showing how protectionists (including a minority of artists) capitalized upon persistent popular stereotypes of national cultural inferiority. Finally, this essay argues that growing disparities of wealth and class sensitivities increasingly affected turn-of-the-century tariff discourse. Protectionists demanded punitive retribution against the international collecting activities of America's ostentatious plutocrats; free-art proponents craved tariff reforms for the didactic purpose of elevating popular taste through exposure to European masterworks.

Imperial Church Stories

2020 ◽  
pp. 202-214
Author(s):  
Katherine D. Moran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Atlantic Coast ◽  
Upper Midwest ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
European Immigration ◽  
Eastern Seaboard ◽  
The U.S

This chapter reviews the argument that in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, in the upper Midwest, Southern California, and the U.S. colonial Philippines, many American Protestants and Catholics turned to idealized visions of Catholic imperial pasts in order to talk about the past and future of U.S. empire. The chapter talks about the broader relevance of the allegory of the Imperial Church, as Americans have continued to think with Catholicism when thinking about their own imperial nation. It also describes the various invocations of Catholic imperial pasts that emerged in the context of three concurrent developments. First is the postbellum national commemorative boom that saw Americans erecting monuments, writing histories, and performing in pageants at a remarkable rate. Second are the two waves of nineteenth-century Catholic European immigration that had supplied American Protestants with Catholic friends, colleagues, and constituents. And third is the center of U.S. economic and cultural power that shifted away from the Eastern Seaboard and no longer so dominated by events and individuals on the Atlantic coast.

The Recent Unpleasantness

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Jack M. Balkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Progressive Era ◽  
American Politics ◽  
Party System ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
Political Regimes ◽  
The Us ◽  
Difficult Transition

American politics appears dysfunctional because the country is going through a very difficult transition. Understanding politics in terms of recurring cycles can offer some hope in troubled times. There are three cycles at work: a cycle of the rise and fall of political regimes; a cycle of polarization and depolarization; and a cycle of constitutional rot and renewal. The United States is facing similar challenges as other constitutional democracies, but the US party system, institutional history, and constitutional structures affect the way that our politics processes these challenges. Hence there is reason for a guarded optimism. We are at the end of our Second Gilded Age, which will give way to a Second Progressive Era. Even in our bitterly polarized world, we can already see signs of how American politics will eventually depolarize, creating new opportunities for cross-party collaboration.

The Appalachian “Gunmen of Capitalism”

2018 ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
T.R.C. Hutton
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
Economic Model ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
The South ◽  
Surplus Labor ◽  
Slave Society

Although the role of the violent strikebreaker is acknowledged by labor historians, few researchers have attempted to explore the origins and motivations of the men who made wages or careers out of surveillancing, disciplining, and punishing wage laborers. William G. Baldwin’s agency, famous as the Baldwin-Felts Detectives, outdid some of the worst atrocities committed by Pinkertons or other organizations outside the South. The career of William Baldwin provides clues as to how the allegedly “colonial” economic model of the Gilded Age/Progressive era contained its own comprador class, native southerners who actively enabled their region’s subordination. Finally, William Baldwin’s work suggests that, aside from familiar themes of surplus labor and hegemony, one of the most integral, fundamental elements of capitalism is the performance of deadly violence, a fact displayed most nakedly in a former slave society.

Revising The Response to Industrialism: Changes in Perspective over Forty Years, 1955–1995

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-14
Author(s):  
Samuel P. Hays
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
American History ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
University Of Chicago ◽  
History Of ◽  
The University ◽  
University Of Chicago Press ◽  
The Way

When I retired in 1991 my first project was to revise The Response to Industrialism, which covered the years from 1877 to 1914. These, of course, are the years we call the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. When the University of Chicago Press asked if I would undertake a revision as part of their desire to update several books in the History of American Civilization Series, I readily agreed. I did so with some instinctive understanding that much about the book would undergo revision, but just what I did not have clearly in mind. Much had changed in the profession, and much had changed in the way I thought about that period in American history. As I worked my way through the first edition the details of those changes became more clear. And so I prepared an introduction to the revision that outlined for the reader just what had changed in my thinking over those forty years.

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