Category: The Gilded Age

I’ve been reading scholarly non-fiction books for over a quarter century now. Over the years I’ve learned to vet my prospective reading list carefully. However, when it came to “American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900” by H.W. Brands (2010), I got a bit sloppy with my due diligence and I paid the price for…

Richard White’s “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America” (2011), which won the Parkman Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, argues that the transcontinental railroads of the late nineteenth century were not the inevitable engines of progress that they were often portrayed to be in earlier notable works of economic…

In “The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896” (2017), historian Richard White presents a sweeping and richly textured account of American life from the end of the Civil War through the pivotal election of 1896 – a period commonly known as the Gilded Age, and which…