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Gilded Ages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 March 2020

Richard White
Richard White*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

With the current bountiful crops of outrages, provocations, and howlings, there is a temptation to evaluate everything in terms of our own Gilded Moment. The temptation needs to be resisted. Our Gilded Moment might be Trumpian, but it draws its fuel from a rebellion against a much lengthier and more complicated era that began in the late 1970s and runs into the present. Asking whether this era is a Second Gilded Age comparable to the First Gilded Age, which began at the end of the Civil War and extended into the early twentieth century, creates a blind man and the elephant problem. Examining different parts of the era can yield disparate conclusions. My task is to comprehend each era as a whole; I think that there are structural similarities stronger than particular differences.

Type
Special Issue: A Second Gilded Age?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , April 2020 , pp. 314 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2020

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References

Notes

1 As is common in special journal issues such as this one, not all papers arrive on time. Some authors drop out, and new ones have to be recruited. As a result, this article does not include all the articles in the issue, only those available when I wrote it.

2 This is not an essay on theory, but, like Thomas Sewell, I think it is events that produce history.

3 Robert Gordon has real wages rising more rapidly after 1900 than between 1870–1900.

4 McNeil, John and Engelke, Peter, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 4, 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Williams, Beth Lew, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Parrillo, Nicholas, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013CrossRefGoogle Scholar); Carpenter, Daniel, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.