Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the apalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was championed by more progressive thinkers, including then...

In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity,...

"The intertwining stories of two Louisiana families--three generations of African-American men--and their struggles to make a place for themselves in a country deeply divided in the aftermath of the Civil War and beyond"--Provided by publisher.

An in-depth look at life for girls and women in America in 1904, discussing city and town life, social reform, new inventions, amusements, and more.

A history of the Reconstruction period and the movements of reform, immigration, industrialization, and urbanization.

"Howard L. Terry wrote a novel between 1917 and 1919, which he donated to the Gallaudet University Archives in 1949. There it rested until a resurgence of interest in Deaf literature led to its recent rediscovery. Mickey's Harvest: A Novel of a Deaf Boy's Checkered Life recounts the rollicking tale of a young deaf boy and how he learned to survive and thrive at the advent of the 20th century. Mickey Dunmore's story begins with the sinking of his father's...

Uses a wide variety of documents to show how Americans dealt with an age of extremes from 1887 to 1900, including rapid industrialization, unemployment, unprecedented wealth, and immigration.

The Gilded age was characterized by prosperity and industrialization that thinly diguised blatant corruption in politics and business.