Resources on the History of the Gilded Age

This page does not focus on scholarly monographs but on novels, historical sources, film documentaries, and other sources of special interest for teachers, students, and general readers.  For scholarly materials see the "Further Reading" lists after each chapter of the book New Spirits. A helpful encyclopedia, designed for high school students but useful for general readers as well, is The Gilded Age and Progressive Era: A Student Companion by Elisabeth Perry and Karen Smith, recently published by Oxford University Press. This list by NO means comprehensive.  It is a personal, rather idiosyncratic list of materials that are fairly easy to obtain and that I have found engaging and useful.  Enjoy! Historical Sources Works of Fiction Documentary Films Web Resources

Image courtesy the Victorian Scrapbook at  The Trade Card Place

Historical Sources

Document collections, autobiographies, and other accounts from the Gilded Age

Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams.  A classic autobiography, richly depicting the elite Bostonian's intellectual and social world.

American Social History Project.  Freedom's Unfinished Revolution. An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction.  A collection of images and documents dealing with slavery, the Civil War, and especially Reconstruction, designed especially for high school students.

American Social History Project. Who Built America?  A two-volume book and CD-ROM packed with documents, images, and information about American labor, broadly construed:  working people from all walks of life, their struggles in the workplace and their involvement in movements for reform.  The first 200 pages of Volume II cover the era 1877-1914.

The Bedford Series in History and Culture, from Bedford Books, are a great series of primary documents that average around 100-150 pages each, include superb introductory materials, and offer a wonderful array of titles on Gilded-Age themes, including the following (see also Bedford editions of works of fiction in the next section of this Resource list):

* Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House, ed. Victoria Bissell Brown
* Colin Calloway, ed., Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost
* Theresa M. Collins and Lisa Gitelman, eds., Thomas Edison and Modern America: A Brief History with Documents
* Peter Duus, ed., The Japanese Discovery of America: A Brief History with Documents (circa 1840s-1870s)
* William L. Riordan, Plunkitt of Tammany Hall, ed. Terrence J. McDonald.
* Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage.  (Note that for those who are struggling to cut textbook costs, this and other primary sources--including fiction by such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and Sarah Orne Jewett's novel Country of the Pointed Firs--are available in Dover Thrift Editions for $1 or $2.  The excellent introductions and notes in the Bedford series, though, are well worth the extra cost.)
* Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900, ed. Jacqueline Jones Royster

Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, an extensive (though pricey) collection of primary documents and excerpts from major historical writings about the era; 2nd ed. 2001, available from Houghton Mifflin.

Janette T. Greenwood, ed., The Gilded Age: A History in Documents, the most recent, affordable general collection of documents from the era, focused more tightly than Fink's collection on the decades between Emancipation and 1900 and designed for grades 6-12, though also useful for general browsing and reading. Available from Oxford University Press.

Henry James, The American Scene (1907), extended and sometimes maddening reflections on James' return to the United States in 1904-1905 for the first time in two decades.  Worth the labor of parsing those Jamesian sentences; scattered on every page are provocative insights on everything from immigration to architecture.

John Ise, Sod and Stubble (originally 1936; available in a reprint from University of Kansas Press, ed. Von Rothenberger).  One of many wonderful records of frontier life, this is an especially vivid and insightful account of German-American farm life in western Kansas, circa 1873-1909, sensitive to the varied roles of women, men, and children, and described by the author as "the story of my mother's life."

Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day: The Story of a Working Girl  (originally 1905; available in reprint from University of Virginia Press, ed. Cindy Sondik Aron). A classic work of investigative journalism by a woman who went "undercover" in New York as a female wage-earner. Makes a wonderful comparative piece with Louisa May Alcott's novel Work (below).

Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives (originally 1890; available from Penguin Classics). A classic work of reform--simultaneously urging the "wealthier half" to get involved in uplifting the slums, and warning them in racialized terms of the perils of crime and disease that might spread from the lower classes.  Helpful in discussing the promise and limits of early progressive reform.

Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers (1974).  A rich life story based on the author's oral interviews with Ned Cobb, an Alabama sharecropper born in 1885.  Part one of the book, "Youth," is an especially rich evocation of African-American life in the deep South for the first generations growing up after Emancipation.

Mari Sandoz, Old Jules (1935). A biography by a leading writer of the Plains, in which she captures the fierce, complex, tormented character of her father, who made his mark in western Nebraska between the 1880s and the 1920s--a book she felt able to write and publish only after his death.  (Sandoz's biography Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas is also a notable favorite.)

Consuelo Vanderbilt, The Glitter and the Gold (1952), a tremendously lively and readable account of Consuelo's upbringing among the nouveau riche and her arranged marriage to the Sixth Duke of Marlborough.

Works of Fiction

Novels and story collections written during the Gilded Age or shortly afterward by those who had lived through it, along with a few recent works of historical fiction (especially those, like James Welch's Fools Crow, dealing with material that is difficult to access through documents or fiction written at the time)

The Bedford Series in History and Culture, from Bedford Books, includes two excellent works of utopian fiction from this era:
* Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 2000-1887, ed. Daniel H. Borus
* William Dean Howells, A Traveler from Altruria, ed. David W. Levy

Henry Adams, Democracy (1876).  A bitter satire on Gilded Age political corruption.

Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (1873).  Varieties of work undertaken by a Northern woman who struggles to earn her own bread.

George Washington Cable, John March, Southerner (1894).  A complex portrait of Reconstruction and the New South by a white Southerner who was an outspoken critic of lynching and racial violence.

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923).  A portrait of Westerners adjusting to hardship and change during the 1890s, capturing some of Cather's own experiences in her Nebraska youth.

Willa Cather, My Antonia (1918). A beautiful evocation of life on the prairies and relations between Americans and new immigrants.

Charles W. Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900).  A story of racial "passing" by one of the most talented African-American authors of the era.

Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901).  Chesnutt's fictional exploration of the impact of a horrific episode of racial violence in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898.

Theodore Dreiser, The Financier (1912).  The first volume of an exhaustive three-volume series, based on the life of Chicago streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes.  The first volume traces his rise in Philadelphia, with extensive and thoroughly researched details on the world of investment, speculation, and urban machines between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900).  One of the great works of American realism, tracing a young woman's journey from rural America to the big city and--depending on how you look at it--either her rise or her fall.

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896).  A young minister finds himself confused and humbled by encounters with Catholics, Darwinists, and freethinkers.  A lost classic, full of humor and insight.

Hamlin Garland, Main-Travelled Roads (1891).  A collection of short stories, many based on personal experience, about the hardships of Midwestern farm life.  Generally considered the best work of this reformer and early realist.

Ellen Glasgow, The Deliverance (1904). Explores the Civil War's legacy, economic and psychological, for a Virginia farm family in the 1880s.

William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). A gentle satire on money-making and social climbing in late nineteenth-century Boston, by an author widely regarded at the time as the dean of American literature.

Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona (1884). The mythic romance of an Indian princess, less impressive today than Jackson's non-fiction indictment of US Indian policy, A Century of Dishonor, but far more popular with readers in her day.

Henry James, The Bostonians (1886).  An ambiguous story, still hotly debated, about reform, the Boston elite, the North and the South after the Civil War, and women's position in society. 

Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Thousand Pieces of Gold (1981), based on the true story of Polly Bemis, the daughter of a poverty-stricken family in northern China who was sold into the American sex trade and ended up as a prosperous rancher in Idaho.  Also made into a full-length movie by the same title.

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936).  At 1,037 page this story of the Old South's destruction and aftermath, reflecting the nostalgia and prejudices that Mitchell absorbed from her own family as a young girl, definitely deserves the title "epic."  Wonderful as an exploration of both Southern whites' experiences and their mythologies; different (and much more complex) than the famous movie version.

O. E. Rolvaag, Giants in the Earth (1927). Originally published in Norway; a grim saga of immigrant struggles on the Plains, by an immigrant who worked on Dakota farms in the 1870s.

Albion Tourgee, A Fool's Errand, by One of the Fools (1880).  A scathing indictment of the limits of Reconstruction,  based on the experiences of an idealistic white Republican who went South to work for reform.  If your only idea of Reconstruction remains the old stereotype of "carpetbaggers" and ignorant freedmen, this is a provocative place to begin thinking anew.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens).  Where to begin with Twain?  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is generally considered his greatest work, but you may prefer such other classics as The Innocents Abroad (1869), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), or the fierce denunciations of greed, hypocrisy, imperialism, and organized religion that Twain issued in later life, in a long series of essays and short stories. 

Margaret Walker, Jubilee (1966).  One of the first attempts by a modern African-American author to write a fictional family saga stretching from slavery through Emancipation and beyond, based on the true story of her own great-grandmother who grew up on a Georgia plantation.  Dramatic and readable.

James Welch, Fools Crow (1986).  Recreates the world of the Blackfeet, circa 1870, as newcomers from the East encroach on their lands in what will become Montana, and members of the tribe react in radically different ways to an impossible set of choices.  A rich and powerful evocation of Native American life.

Owen Wister, The Virginian (1902).  Arguably the book that launched "The Western" as a modern fictional and film genre, though Wister himself was indebted to a long series of popular dime novels and other treatments of the frontier.  A "Southern" and "Northern" as well as a Western, since it deals with the legacies of the Civi War and themes of sectional reconciliation.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920).  My favorite of Wharton's novels, though others will prefer The House of Mirth (1905), Ethan Frome (1911), the novellas in Old New York (1924), or Wharton's autobiography A Backward Glance (1934).  Capturing some of the complexities of the elite New York world in which Wharton grew up, Age of Innocence is also a great motion picture. (Warning: after watching Scorsese's meticulous re-creation of a Gilded Age banquet you may find yourself not wanting to eat much for a couple of days).

Documentary Films

By far the best thing going, in my opinion, is The American Experience from PBS and WGBH Boston (the link here is to a list of titles relating to the era 1865-1900).  Various titles in this series--notably "Last Stand at Little Big Horn," "Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice," "Jubilee Singers," "The Richest Man in the World: Andrew Carnegie," and "Edison's Miracle of Light"--have served me well in the classroom and the PBS website includes background documents and teacher's guides.

A longer and very valuable entry in this series is Reconstruction: The Second Civil War, which has a large website of accompanying primary materials.

See also the relevant hours of The West, produced by Ken Burns, with a very extensive companion website.

Ken Burns has produced other films for PBS that focus on the post-Civil War era, such as Not for Ourselves Alone, a treatment of the lives of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  A little long and slow (in the Burnsian style) but filled with wonderful quotations from the speeches, public writings, and private correspondence of these women's rights advocates and their colleagues and friends.
 
Numerous feature films--like Thousand Pieces of Gold and The Age of Innocence, above--deal with Gilded Age themes, though all should be treated with caution as fictional re-creations.  One idiosyncratic favorite of mine is The Ballad of Little Jo, a Western about a woman who is thrown out by her Boston family and heads west alone, leaving her illegitimate child with her sister, and makes some surprising choices on the way. (If you turn the sound off and simply follow the images, this movie is an extended meditation on gender, identity, and work.)  For historians' angles on some of the most noted, see the short film-by-film assessments in Past Imperfect, edited by Mark C. Carnes.

Web Resources

An excellent list of weblinks is maintained by The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at H-Net Humanities Online. H-Net also maintains discussion groups and compiles bibliographies and book reviews, which is a wonderful entry point for exploring recent scholarship and historians' debates about this era.  It's a thorough list of links, so the additional sites listed below are just supplementary personal favorites (links to many of which also appear on the site above).

The Making of America, a staggering collection of word-searchable books and journals from the nineteenth-century, hosted by the University of Michigan

American Memory at the Library of Congress: an even MORE immense site; the link here is to collections related to US history between 1850 and 1899.  The LOC has cooperated with an array of state and local history centers, such as the Nebraska Historical Society, the New York Public Library, and the Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Special Collections Library at Duke University, to present materials here.  You could browse this site for a lifetime, "attending" a meeting of the National Afro-American Council in 1898 and savoring everything from sheet music to advertisements to stereographs.

Documenting the American South, at the University of North Carolina features documents ranging from the colonial era into the 20th century including a good selection on the post-Civil War years.

America in the 1890s, at Bowling Green State University, contains an array of materials on that pivotal decade.

For those interested in politics, President Elect has state-by-state returns and maps. Alas, I believe there is no equivalent website (yet) for Congressional returns but there IS a superb reference book that may be at your local library:  Kenneth Martis, The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress, 1898-1989 (Macmillan, 1988).

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000, at SUNY Binghamton, has a large collection of documents and teacher's guides with considerable material on the late 19th century; about two-thirds of the material is now available only by paid subscription but the rest is free on the web.

Resources on the Gilded Age at the WWW Virtual Library might possibly have a few things missed by the links above (or not)

A popular brand of rat poison based its ad campaign on extremely widespread
animosity toward Chinese immigrants, borrowing the slogan of San Francisco
anti-immigrant zealot Dennis Kearney, who proclaimed, "The Chinese must go,"
while simultaneously playing on popular beliefs that "sub-human" Chinese ate rats
Image courtesy the Victorian Scrapbook at The Trade Card Place.