Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
Richard Schneirov's call for rethinking the post-Reconstruction era is long overdue and most welcome. For reasons he lays out with admirable clarity and insight, recent approaches have not offered a satisfactory synthesis. A new narrative offers considerable benefits to historians of the era and the broader publics we serve.
1 Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar; and Bensel, Richard F., Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 (Cambridge, UK, 1990)Google Scholar, and The Political Economy of American Industrialisation. 1877-1899 (Cambridge, UK, 2000)Google Scholar.
2 Gates, Paul W., The Farmers' Age: Agriculture, 1815-1860 (New York, 1960), 95Google Scholar; Indianapolis Labor Signal, Nov. 20, 1891.
3 , Gates, The Farmers' Age, 81, 58, 80Google Scholar; see also 403. Allan Bogue also notes that “the fundamental motives of the settlers bear closer scrutiny than most historians have bothered to give them.” Money at Interest: The Farm Mortgage on the Middle Border (Ithaca, NY, 1955), 274Google Scholar.
4 American Nonconformist and Kansas Industrial Liberator, Feb. 17, 1887. My research on Lease will appear (eventually!) as “Spellbinder: The life and Times of Mary E. Lease, People's Advocate.”
5 H-Net SHGAPE discussion list, January-February 2006; for positive uses of the term “Gilded Age” see the websites and publications of the Victorian Society in America, Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Florida. It is perhaps worth noting here that a switch to the “Age of Incorporation” would enable the unpronounceable SHGAPE to become the more euphonious SHAIPE.
6 Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991).Google Scholar
7 Hsu, Madeline, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, CA, 2000)Google Scholar; Wyman, Mark, Round-Trip to America: The Immigrants Return to Europe, 1880-1930 (Ithaca, NY, 1993)Google Scholar.
8 I have sought to synthesize and connect some of these developments in New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (New York, 2006).Google Scholar I intended the book's subtitle to be Americans and the World, but “Gilded Age” is so entrenched as the term for this period that Oxford editors insisted that it be included in the subtitle.