Gilded Age Research Articles

"Dollar Princesses" and "Husband Hunters": The Gilded Age Redefinition of the American Heiress

"Dollar Princesses" and "Husband Hunters": The Gilded Age Redefinition of the American Heiress

Satire vs Sentiment: Mark Twain, Bella Z. Spencer, and the Subscription Book Market

Abstract: This essay argues that Mark Twain has been overrepresented in scholarship on subscription bookselling, resulting in a corresponding failure to account for fiction's relationship to this popular nineteenth-century practice. Though Twain's The Gilded Age (1873) is often described as the first novel sold by subscription, I recover an earlier example: Tried and True (1866), a Civil War romance by Bella Zilfa Spencer. Reading the novel's mode of distribution as integral to its treatment of gender, race, and geography, I demonstrate the potential for literary study which gets lost somewhere between subscription bookselling's bad reputation and Mark Twain's good one.

When the Center Held: America's Protestant Establishment from the Gilded Age through the 1960s

When the Center Held: America's Protestant Establishment from the Gilded Age through the 1960s

When Bad Men Combine: The Star Route Scandal and the Twilight of Gilded Age Politics

When Bad Men Combine: The Star Route Scandal and the Twilight of Gilded Age Politics

Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America

Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. By William S. Cossen

Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. By William S. Cossen

A Timeline of Journalistic Influence of Writing on the Gilded Age in American Literature

The themes found in the writings by authors during the Gilded Age are still prevalent in writings of the twenty-first century. The Gilded Age, a term used to describe a period of economic boom after the American Civil War at the turn of the century, influenced communication to readers by using the ethos unearthed by writers who were opposed to a particular politician and their policies. The Gilded Age was a time of rapid economic growth through the invention of the railroad and business. What looked like a golden time was an era of great growing pains in America between the industrial worker and the wealthy business owner. What the Gilded Age symbolized in both life and writing has become a model of writing that extended to current literature. American writers contributed to a great body of literature that flourished during the Gilded Age. The Gilded Age was a time of rapid economic growth through the invention of the railroad and business. Literature was used as a social revolt that violated the growing power of business and growing government corruption that outlined the utopias of the inefficiency of a capitalistic system. Within genres of writing such as Poetry, the later nineteenth century, and early years of the twentieth century were a poor period for American poetry providing themes of distress, doubts, and fears about American life. Within the genres of writing, newspaper writing played a crucial role in exposing scandals, the pathos of the American Dream, and the logos or persuasion by using the trials of society. Writing was a powerful communication tool during the Gilded Age that allowed writers to target events during this era. Newspaper writing was important to communicating prominent issues to the public, as it upheld ideals to question government and keep it accountable. However, the Gilded Age writings helped to permanently etch in the minds of readers the importance of themes that were prevalent post-Civil War that impacted the writing and writers of American Literature.

Strengthening State Capacity: Civil Service Reform and Public Sector Performance during the Gilded Age

We use newly digitized records from the post office to study the effects of strengthened state capacity between 1875 and 1901. Exploiting the implementation of the Pendleton Act—a landmark statute that shielded bureaucrats from political interference—across US cities over two waves, we find that civil service reform reduced postal delivery errors and increased productivity. These improvements were most pronounced during election years when the reform dampened bureaucratic turnover. We provide suggestive evidence that reformed cities witnessed declining local partisan newspapers. Separating politics from administration, therefore, not only improved state effectiveness but also weakened the role of local politics. (JEL D24, D73, H83, J45, L82, L87, N41)

Banking on railroads: The effect of market access on banking provision during the Gilded Age

AbstractI examine the effect that market access, induced by the railroad network expansion, had on banking provision in nineteenth‐century America. I find that market access increased the number of national banks. This effect operated via the extensive margin, with market access increasing the probability of having a national bank for affected counties. I find that counties had more national bank activity, with increased assets, loans, deposits, and other outcomes. I do not, however, find any effect of market access on banks already in operation. Market access therefore increased banking provision chiefly through the increased entry of national banks.

Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times: Explaining Executive Power in the Gilded Age by Mark Zachary Taylor

Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times: Explaining Executive Power in the Gilded Age <i>by Mark Zachary Taylor</i>

“Old-Time Negroes”: Nostalgic Ex-Slave Narratives in New York Newspapers of the Gilded Age

In the field of social memory of slavery, a growing body of scholarship on the Jim Crow North has complicated the notion of white supremacy as a specifically Southern ideology, locating what historians view as a “missing link” in the history of race in America. This study examines a corollary gap in American journalism history—the role that white Northern newspapers played a generation after Emancipation in softening white memory of slavery and hardening discourse toward African Americans. This article applies narrative analysis to sample five large-circulation white New York City newspapers from 1889 to 1910, along with a contemporary Black city newspaper. The study concludes that white newspapers, by perpetuating racist tropes upstreamed from literature, cultivated Jim Crow ideology beyond the former Confederacy. The findings shed light on the timeline of Black Americans’ struggle for mass media representation and demonstrate journalism’s intertextual role in shaping social memory.

Phillippa Pitts. Review of "The Medicine of Art: Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America" by Elizabeth L. Lee.

Phillippa Pitts. Review of "The Medicine of Art: Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America" by Elizabeth L. Lee.

The Gilded Age by Julian Fellowes (review)

The Gilded Age by Julian Fellowes (review)

Fernando Wood's Long Gilded Age

Fernando Wood's Long Gilded Age

Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by William S. Cossen (review)

Making Catholic America: Religious Nationalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era by William S. Cossen (review)

Review: Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America, by Joseph Giacomelli

Review: <i>Uncertain Climes: Debating Climate Change in Gilded Age America</i>, by Joseph Giacomelli

Kerosene Is King: Kerosene Consumers and the Antitrust Movement against Standard Oil, 1859–1911

AbstractIn the late nineteenth-century United States, kerosene became a universal illuminant for artificial lighting, providing its users with a shared material environment. While kerosene users employed the fluid not only for lighting but also for washing, cooking, and cleaning, they had to deal with the material’s risks, such as fires and explosions. With the help of chemists and domestic advisors, American consumers adapted to this ambivalent material condition, weaving kerosene into their economic life and social thought. In so doing, some consumers identified as a “professional class” that navigated within this material environment through their own expertise—which paralleled their economic struggle within a rapidly growing but volatile political economy during the Gilded Age. As Standard Oil’s monopolization of the kerosene business became a substantial issue in national politics, this social consciousness among kerosene users attracted anti-monopolists like Ida Tarbell. Because Standard Oil had lowered the consumer price, these reformers sought an alternative rationale to persuade kerosene-consuming households to participate in the antitrust movement against the company. Examining how these progressive reformers turned kerosene consumers’ social identity to their political ends, this article sheds new light on the relationship between the energy transition, consumer culture, and American capitalism.

Legislating Morality in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era: Moral Panic and the “White Slave” Case That Changed America

AbstractThis article is based on the presidential address presented to the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era at the meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Los Angeles in 2023. Its focus is Maury Diggs and Drew Caminetti, two white men from Sacramento, California, charged with violating the Mann Act (known as the White Slave Trafficking Act) in 1913. The Gilded Age and Progressive Era obsession with white slavery, a phenomenon that has particular resonance in today’s climate, reveals the power of moral panics. Examining the steps, and missteps, that various legal, social, and political entities, including all three branches of government, took in response to Diggs and Caminetti’s actions highlights some of the major social changes gripping the nation. Moral panics can be investigated as crucial historical sites of contestation, revealing efforts to neutralize or turn back the societal changes perceived to be the greatest threat to the prevailing social power structure—in this case foreigners, the new leisure culture, the liberalization of sexual attitudes, and the threat of female independence. Understanding the origins and repercussions of past moral panics can help identify, understand, and possibly defuse future panics.

All That Is Solid Bursts into Flame: Capitalism and Fire in the Nineteenth-Century United States

Abstract Industrial capitalism arrived in Europe as great urban fires were already retreating. The United States, however, was generously timbered and far more reliant on wooden construction. As a result, its infernos continued, and even increased, well into its age of capital. They especially struck places of intense commodification: hastily built settler towns, slave cities, financial centres and sites of mineral extraction. Noting the connection between fire and capitalism, a class of upwardly mobile strivers came to appreciate fires for their ability to disrupt social hierarchies, reset property relations and nurture economic dynamism. Oddly, many who had suffered fires even interpreted them as ‘blessings in disguise’. This pyrophilia was not universal, however, and the richest men of the Gilded Age strenuously opposed it, seeking instead to fireproof the environment. The clash between pyrophobes and pyrophiles was between economic incumbents and economic insurgents, and it touched on many areas of late nineteenth-century culture. Familiar Gilded Age artefacts such as Chicago’s White City and L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz can be productively understood in terms of this widespread fight over the value of fire, and thus the shape of capitalism.

Just not cricket: Baseball, youth and national identity in late nineteenth-century children’s magazines

In the late nineteenth century, baseball became enshrined as America’s national sport. Across American culture, the game became imbued with a series of values and characteristics that seemed redolent of life in the Gilded Age and beyond. This article explores the ways in which this process played out in the pages of popular magazines directed at the children of the nation’s elite. These neglected resources provide us with an extraordinary lens through which to chart both the changing place of the national game within the lives of American children and the changing meaning of baseball within the life of the nation. In poems, stories, illustrations, editorials and even reader’s letters, children were newly acculturated into the sporting life in ways that had profound implications for wider questions of childhood, gender, race, class and national identity.