There was a profound difference between Christian Socialism and the so-called “Social Gospel.” Janine Giordano Drake explains these differences in her new book The Gospel of Church: How Mainline Protestants Vilified Christian Socialism and Fractured the Labor Movement. Drake argues that...
William Cossen is a teacher in the Social Studies Department at The Gwinnett School of Mathematics, Science, and Technology. This interview is based on his new book, Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (Cornell University...
Julie Carr is Professor of English and Chair of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. This interview is based on her new book, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West (University...
Joseph Giacomelli is Assistant Professor of Environmental History at Duke Kunshan University. This interview is based on his new book, Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America (University of Chicago Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write...
Chad Pearson is Principal Lecturer of History at the University of North Texas. This interview is based on his new book, Capital’s Terrorists: Klansmen, Lawmen, and Employers in the Long Nineteenth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What...
Last weekend we dropped Episode 103 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home Podcast with historian Vaneesa Cook, author of Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left. I hope you enjoy this episode. If you are interested in learning more...
Thomas Alter is Assistant Professor of History at Texas State University. This interview is based on his new book, Toward a Cooperative Commonwealth: The Transplanted Roots of Farmer-Labor Radicalism in Texas (University of Illinois Press, 2022). JF: What led you...
Annie Thorn is a sophomore history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column titled “Out of the Zoo.” It focuses on life as...
Over at Readers Almanac, the blog of the Library of America, Stanford historian Richard White answers a few questions about his recent book, The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Here is...
Yesterday we posted a link to a History News Network interview with Stanford historian Richard White. Today, White is back with a piece at Smithsonian.com on the idea of “home” in America’s Gilded Age. Here is a taste: When reduced to...
The obvious answer is quality consumer goods. How could we live without them? At least this is how Pennsylvania steel magnate Andrew Carnegie would have answered the question posed in the title of my post. Yesterday in my Pennsylvania History class...
Timothy Gloege is a historian and independent scholar based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This interview is based on his new book, Guaranteed Pure: The Moody Bible Institute, Business, and the Making of Modern Evangelicalism (University of North Carolina Press, April 2015). JF: What led...
Immigrants and ABS agents at Ellis Island Want to get some context for this post? Click here.I am back at the American Bible Society archives in New York City. Yesterday was a travel day, but I did manage to get some...
But, according to Credit Fix, all of this changed in the Gilded Age when Americans began to think of the American dream “not as competency but rather as the accumulation of great wealth.” The change had a lot to do...
Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America has been on my reading list for a couple of years now. Tim Lacy’s recent reflection on the book at U.S. Intellectual History has convinced me to bring it...
