Gilded Age

• 
• 5/22/2022
  

  Jane Stanford's Murder Shows the Moral Vacuum of Gilded Age Fortune and Philanthropy

  by Richard White

  Jane Stanford's murder by poisoning in 1905 was part of a long chain of inequities and moral abdications that attended the great Gilded Age fortunes at every step, from their accumulation to their dispersal as philanthropy. 

• 
• SOURCE: NBC News
  4/27/2022
  

  Musk's Twitter Bid Harkens Back to Hearst

  Richard White and Brad DeLong consider how the megabillionaire's bid for Twitter stacks up against other efforts by the ultra-rich to build media empires – is it more about attention and less about advancing financial interests? 

• 
• SOURCE: The Baffler
  4/21/2022
  

  Union Organizing in the Long Shadow of the Gilded Age

  by Daisy Pitkin

  On listening to Andrew Carnegie's "The Gospel of Wealth" in Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library as librarians perform the kind of social services Carnegie deplored (and try to organize a union, which he deplored more). 

• 
• 2/13/2022
  

  The Gilded Age's Original "Galentine's Day"

  by Anya Jabour

  The search for alternatives to the compulsory heterosexual coupledom of Valentine's Day could learn from the example of the "Perfect Little Ladies" of 1890s Rochester, New York.

• 
• SOURCE: Jacobin
  2/1/2022
  

  How the Left Lost the Constitution

  by Benjamin Morse

   Law professors Joseph Fiskin and William Forbath revisit the Reconstruction Amendments to argue that they represent a fusion of a "democracy-of-opportunity" tradition in the law that embraces an affirmative government duty to redistribute wealth. 

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  1/20/2022
  

  The True History Behind HBO's "The Gilded Age"

  by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  The new series follows fictional characters but is well-grounded in the innovations and inequalities that characterized urban America in the late nineteenth century, thanks in large part to the work of the show's historical consultant Professor Eric Armstrong Dunbar.

• 
• SOURCE: Forward
  6/28/2021
  

  The Surfside Disaster is Our Generation's Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Moment

  by Hannah Lebovits

  The deadly collapse of the Surfside condo building near Miami should be a call for Jewish Americans to protest for reform in the way that Jewish immigrant workers did after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  2/9/2021
  

  How Will Jeff Bezos Spend His Billions Now?

  by Margaret O'Mara

  John D. Rockefeller used philanthropy to blunt harsh criticism of his business practices and the social dysfunction represented by his immense wealth. What will his 21st-century analogue Jeff Bezos do for an image-burnishing second act? And will it be about service to the public or service to Bezos? 

• 
• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  9/10/2020
  

  History and Gentrification Clash in a Gilded Age Resort

  A proposal to redevelop a section of Newport, Rhode Island far from the city's typical tourist destinations has generated an unlikely alliance of low-income residents who fear displacement and affluent historic preservation advocates. 

• 
• 6/28/2020
  

  Big Alex McKenzie and the Last Great Fraud of the Gilded Age

  by Paul Starobin

  Alexander McKenzie’s plot to corner Alaska’s gold proved to be the last great swindle of the original gilded age, as this seamy chapter in our national life gave way to what become known as the Progressive Era.

• 
• SOURCE: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
  4/7/2020
  

  SHGAPE Prizes 2020

  by Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

  Andrew Huebner, Caroline Grego, Alana Toulin and Mark C. Boxell are winners of annual prizes from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/10/2020
  

  We’ve Been Looking in the Wrong Places to Understand Sanders’s Socialism

  by Richard White

  Detractors like to equate Senator Bernie Sanders’s socialism with Soviet and Chinese Communism, but they’re swinging at the wrong century, the wrong country and the wrong socialism.

• 
• SOURCE: History.com
  1/27/20
  

  How the Gilded Age's Top 1 Percent Thrived on Corruption

  Railroads Were at the Forefront of Political Corruption  

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  10-26-18 (accessed)
  

  The Court Case That Inspired the Gilded Age’s #MeToo Moment

  A turn-of-the-century trial, the focus of a new book, took aim at the Victorian double standard.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  10-4-18
  

  Think journalism’s a tough field today?

  by Randall S. Sumpter

  Try being a reporter in the Gilded Age.

• 
• SOURCE: History channel
  6-15-18
  

  Are We Living in the Gilded Age 2.0 ?

  by Edward T. O’Donnell

  The original Gilded Age was followed by the Progressive Era.  Will ours?

• 
• SOURCE: New Republic
  6-13-18
  

  Lessons From the Gilded Age

  by Sarah Jones

  America today has a lot in common with that bygone era of monopolies and gross inequality. But will the country respond similarly?

• 
• 3/18/18
  

  Why It’s Dangerous to Give in to Facile Analogies Between the Last Gilded Age and Our Own

  by Leon Fink

  One lesson is that the history of Gilded Ages is complicated and that should give us hope.

• 
• SOURCE: Library of America
  2/14/18
  

  Right after the Civil War, says Stanford's Richard White, Americans were really hopeful, then reality hit

  By the 1870s the gulf between the ideal and the reality had widened considerably and would continue to widen for the rest of the century.

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  10-26-17
  

  World's witnessing a new Gilded Age as billionaires’ wealth swells to $6tn

  Not since the time of the Carnegies, Rockefellers and Vanderbilts at the turn of the 20th century was so much owned by so few.