Immigration and migration, racism and civil rights, labor and industry, women and universal suffrage, American Indians, and the environment are just a few of the issues that came to the fore during the Gilded Age.
With this collection, Alexander Street Press brings together 40,000 pages of full text, photographs, songs for listening online, and other primary materials, along with video interviews and twenty-five critical documentary essays. Each documentary essay poses an interpretive question and then illuminates it with dozens of annotated primary documents, introductions, and essays. The critical documentary essays have been created by leading scholars in the field, including Samuel Thomas of Michigan State University, Christopher Reed of Roosevelt University, Kim Warren of the University of Kansas, and Daniel Thorp of Virginia Tech. The result is a highly visual, annotated record of this critical period in American history.
Building on the award-winning work and Web site created by Drew VandeCreek at Northern Illinois University, Alexander Street’s The Gilded Age is organized around more than ten historical themes, with associated document projects. Examples include:
Race and Ethnicity
Reconstruction politics and race
Native Americans’ education for citizenship
The Chinese exclusion movement
Economics, Labor, and Commerce
The Knights of Labor
Currency and the Greenback movement
Gilded Age railroads
Government, Politics, and Law
The election of 1884
Populism and the People’s Party
Political reform in New York City
Women
Women’s voting in the West
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union
Women and lynching
Arts and Culture
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition
Gilded Age music
Mark Twain and the Mississippi River
Social Progress and Reform
Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s anti-lynching campaign
The Chautauqua Movement
The Grange and cooperative farming organizations
War and Military Life
The Battle of Little Bighorn
The Spanish-American War
American colonialism following the Spanish-American War
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