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...
gilded age
Out of the Zoo: “We’re a union just by saying so!”
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...
Historian Richard White on the Gilded Age
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...
Historian Richard White on “Home”
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...
What is More Important: Quality Consumer Goods or Social Equality?
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...
The Author’s Corner with Timothy E.W. Gloege
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...
On Writing a History of the American Bible Society–Update #47
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...
Richard White: “Americans Didn’t Always Yearn for Riches”
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...
Tim Lacy on Jackson Lears’s “Rebirth of a Nation”
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...