Recommended Resources
The Gilded Age
The books, articles, films, and websites in this section will enhance the materials included on our website for this era of American history. Many of the books are by the historians whose essays and lectures you have read and listened to here and offer in-depth studies of the topics that have caught your interest. The websites and other resources open new ways to explore American history and take advantage of new interpretations and new technologies to enhance classroom or at-home learning.
Kessner, Thomas. Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2003.
Letwin, William. Law and Economic Policy in America: The Evolution of the Sherman Antitrust Act. New York: Random House, 1965.
Fink, Leon, ed. Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era: Documents and Essays. 2nd ed. Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.
Mink, Gwendolyn. Old Labor and New Immigrants in American Political Development: Union, Party, and State, 1875–1920. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986.
Greene, Julie. Pure and Simple Politics: The American Federation of Labor and Political Activism, 1881–1917. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Ayers, Edward L. Southern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877–1906. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.
O’Toole, Patricia. The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918. 1990. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2006.
Ayers, Edward L. The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Bender, Thomas. Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.
Recommended Resources from Other Sub-Eras
Cannato, Vincent J. American Passage: The History of Ellis Island. New York: Harper, 2009.
Cherny, Robert W. American Politics in the Gilded Age, 1868–1900. Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1997.
Moore, Leonard J. Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921–1928. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991.
Bender, Thomas. Community and Social Change in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978.
Phelan, Craig. Grand Master Workman: Terence Powderly and the Knights of Labor. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.
Roediger, David R., and Franklin Rosemont. Haymarket Scrapbook. Chicago: Charles H Kerr, 1986.
Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Holt, Rackham. Mary McLeod Bethune: A Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1964.
Chafe, William H., Raymond Gavins, Robert Korstad, et al., eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell about Life in the Segregated South. New York: New Press, 2001.
May, Lary. Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.
Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.
Glenn, Robert W. The Haymarket Affair: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
McGurl, Mark. The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Schneirov, Richard, Shelton Stromquist, and Nick Salvatore, ed. The Pullman Strike and the Crisis of the 1890s: Essays on Labor and Politics. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Lindsey, Almont. The Pullman Strike: The Story of a Unique Experiment and of a Great Labor Upheaval. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942.
Delbanco, Andrew. The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.