The Gilded Age: Inequality, Populism, and Power
The Gilded Age—a phrase coined by Mark Twain—looms large in the American political imagination as an era of robber barons, pitched clashes between capital and labor, violent racism, and unprecedented wealth inequality. Fueled by wartime demand and cheap money during the Civil War, industrial capitalism in the United States had its moment of takeoff during the postwar decades, creating vast fortunes for a new oligopoly, even as farmers and workers toiled in desperate conditions. The structural transformation of the economy, abetted by a bipartisan consensus in Congress and a compliant Supreme Court, in turn elicited one of the strongest grassroots political rebellions in American history in an uneasy coalition of labor, anarchists, and agrarian Populists. its energy provided the momentum for a new generation of Progressive intellectuals and reformers, whose persistence eventually limited the worst excesses of the Gilded Age even as they helped stabilize American capitalism for the coming imperial century. As the oligarchical forces in our own “new Gilded Age” gain in strength, are there lessons to be learned from the “original” Gilded Age about the ideas, forms, and strategies that are most effective in resisting and overcoming concentrated power and inequality in the United States?
In this course, we will trace the long arc of the Gilded Age from its post-Civil War origins, through the racial settlement that ended Reconstruction, into the contentious battles of the 1880s and ‘90s, most notably Haymarket, Homestead, and the Populist revolt. We’ll also examine in detail how left and liberal intellectuals advanced new conceptions of property, regulation, society, and democracy to lay the groundwork for Progressive and Socialist political campaigns after 1900. Who was this new aristocracy of wealth and what cultural institutions bound them together? What transformations were wrought in the American landscape, both urban and rural? What strategies did the opposition employ in the face of such tremendous concentrations of economic and political power? And what role did Progressives play in stabilizing corporate hegemony perhaps at the expense of democratic political influence? Our main course text will be Nell Irvin Painter’s classic Standing at Armageddon, with supplementary readings by Eric Foner, Jackson Lears, Sven Beckert, Mike Davis, Robert Wiebe, William Cronon, Martin Sklar, and others. We’ll also explore important primary sources by Henry George, Frederick J. Turner, Jane Addams, W.E.B. Du Bois, Henry Adams, Walter Lippmann, and Randolph Bourne.
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Course Schedule
Tuesday, 6:30-9:30pm ETJuly 08 — July 29, 2025
4 weeks
$335.00
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