View Full Version : Recommendation: sources for the US reconstruction period
IMO this era, post civil war US reconstruction from 1865-1900, is criminally under published. It is the era that made our nation what it is (or at least what it was before the Information/Wal Mart age).
I honestly know very little about it, and would be super gratified (might even send you a cookie) if those who know more than I can point me to good sources, or discuss the period here.
needs
17 Jan 2006, 05:36 PM
IMO this era, post civil war US reconstruction from 1865-1900, is criminally under published. It is the era that made our nation what it is (or at least what it was before the Information/Wal Mart age).
I honestly know very little about it, and would be super gratified (might even send you a cookie) if those who know more than I can point me to good sources, or discuss the period here.
The place to start is Eric Foner's Reconstruction (get the big fat one, not the "Short History"). From there, you might want to check out Thomas Holt's work on South Carolina and its Black politicians, Elsa Barkely Brown's work on public space in Richmond. If you have access to jstor, do a reconstruction search in the Journal of American History and you'll pull up a bunch of interesting material.
If you want to go beyond the end of reconstruction into the Gilded Age, try Alan Trachtenberg's Age of Incorporation, Nell Painter's Standing at Armageddon, Grace Hale's Making Whiteness. PM me if you have particular interests.
MRod
19 Jan 2006, 09:44 PM
The place to start is Eric Foner's Reconstruction (get the big fat one, not the "Short History"). From there, you might want to check out Thomas Holt's work on South Carolina and its Black politicians, Elsa Barkely Brown's work on public space in Richmond. If you have access to jstor, do a reconstruction search in the Journal of American History and you'll pull up a bunch of interesting material.
If you want to go beyond the end of reconstruction into the Gilded Age, try Alan Trachtenberg's Age of Incorporation, Nell Painter's Standing at Armageddon, Grace Hale's Making Whiteness. PM me if you have particular interests.
Care to explain what the Gilded Age was all about? In my American History class we recently finished Reconstruction and moved into Industrialization and Progressivism.
needs
20 Jan 2006, 09:12 AM
Care to explain what the Gilded Age was all about? In my American History class we recently finished Reconstruction and moved into Industrialization and Progressivism.
I often tell my students to think of the Gilded Age as the age of the -ations. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, incorporation.
There are a few key things that occurred during the Gilded Age:
1. The birth of big business. Think of the Gilded Age as the origin point for the kind of big business we think about today. Standard oil, Swift, Armour, Carnegie Steel, J.P. Morgan banking were all founded during the Gilded Age, as was the modern corporation.
What characterized the really big corporations during the Gilded Age was both horizontal integration, where one corporation controlled the vast majority of business in its sector by buying out competitors (Standard Oil) and vertical integration, where they controlled everything they needed for production. Carnegie Steel, for example, owned Mesabi iron mines, coal supplies in Pennsylvania, Great Lakes ships, and steel factories in Pittsburgh.
These corporations were also the first really large anonymous workplaces in American history, leading to a lot of anxiety about what it meant to work for someone else for the entirety of one's life. This kind of incorporation leads to the other three -ations.
2. The rise of social darwinism. If we think about Reconstruction as the effort to include the freed slaves into the political sphere, the Gilded Age represents the abandonment of this effort. The Gilded Age saw a revival of scientific racism and a reordering of how people understood the nation and the world along Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" lines. The notion was that those most fit to leadership had risen to the top of society, and that they had a duty, a "White Man's Burden" to spread civilization around the nation and world. Connected to this was an increased campaign to limit immigration (which isn't successful) and to exclude Blacks from political activity on the grounds that they were unfit (which was).
3. Political corruption. The new corporate titans manipulated government to meet their needs. At the same time, large political machines in the new cities sought to provide social services to new immigrants in return for their votes and the spoils that came from controlling city services. (George Washington Plunkitt had the famous line about "honest graft," "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.")
4. "Liberty of contract" During the Gilded Age the Supreme Court reread the post-Civil War amendments, mainly the 14th, to mean that governments could not intervene between worker and employer to set limits on terms of employment. Called 'liberty of contract' doctrine, this knocked out efforts to put in an 8 hour day, minimum wages, and safety regulation.
5. Massive urban poverty on new scales. The Gilded Age sees the first example of what we might call the underclass, massive, entrenched urban poverty, living in conditions that shocked the nation when they were publicized.
In all these ways, Progressivism was a reaction against what went on in the Gilded Age, trying to reform capitalism and political corruption, looking for ways to protect workers. Interestingly, many progressives did not abandon social darwinism, but carried out these actions in the name of social darwinism and efficiency.
Whew.
ratdog
20 Jan 2006, 09:56 AM
"Socializing Capital" by William G. Roy
"Organizing America" by Charles Perrow
"Industrializing America" by Walter Licht
For our imperial foreign plicy during that period, try Walter LaFeber's "The New Empire"
Happy reading!
needs
20 Jan 2006, 10:04 AM
"Socializing Capital" by William G. Roy
"Organizing America" by Charles Perrow
"Industrializing America" by Walter Licht
For our imperial foreign plicy during that period, try Walter LaFeber's "The New Empire"
Happy reading!
For the imperialism, there's a relatively new book by Matthew Frye Jacobson that connects US imperialism and immigration to the US as part of the same story of the US becoming the worlds metropolitan center. Really interesting argument. I'll google it. Barbarian Virtues: The US Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad.
On the rise of the corporation, Alfred Chandler's The Visible Hand is still the big book, even though it must be 25 years old.
MRod
20 Jan 2006, 01:20 PM
I often tell my students to think of the Gilded Age as the age of the -ations. Industrialization, urbanization, immigration, incorporation.
There are a few key things that occurred during the Gilded Age:
1. The birth of big business. Think of the Gilded Age as the origin point for the kind of big business we think about today. Standard oil, Swift, Armour, Carnegie Steel, J.P. Morgan banking were all founded during the Gilded Age, as was the modern corporation.
What characterized the really big corporations during the Gilded Age was both horizontal integration, where one corporation controlled the vast majority of business in its sector by buying out competitors (Standard Oil) and vertical integration, where they controlled everything they needed for production. Carnegie Steel, for example, owned Mesabi iron mines, coal supplies in Pennsylvania, Great Lakes ships, and steel factories in Pittsburgh.
These corporations were also the first really large anonymous workplaces in American history, leading to a lot of anxiety about what it meant to work for someone else for the entirety of one's life. This kind of incorporation leads to the other three -ations.
2. The rise of social darwinism. If we think about Reconstruction as the effort to include the freed slaves into the political sphere, the Gilded Age represents the abandonment of this effort. The Gilded Age saw a revival of scientific racism and a reordering of how people understood the nation and the world along Herbert Spencer's "survival of the fittest" lines. The notion was that those most fit to leadership had risen to the top of society, and that they had a duty, a "White Man's Burden" to spread civilization around the nation and world. Connected to this was an increased campaign to limit immigration (which isn't successful) and to exclude Blacks from political activity on the grounds that they were unfit (which was).
3. Political corruption. The new corporate titans manipulated government to meet their needs. At the same time, large political machines in the new cities sought to provide social services to new immigrants in return for their votes and the spoils that came from controlling city services. (George Washington Plunkitt had the famous line about "honest graft," "I seen my opportunities and I took 'em.")
4. "Liberty of contract" During the Gilded Age the Supreme Court reread the post-Civil War amendments, mainly the 14th, to mean that governments could not intervene between worker and employer to set limits on terms of employment. Called 'liberty of contract' doctrine, this knocked out efforts to put in an 8 hour day, minimum wages, and safety regulation.
5. Massive urban poverty on new scales. The Gilded Age sees the first example of what we might call the underclass, massive, entrenched urban poverty, living in conditions that shocked the nation when they were publicized.
In all these ways, Progressivism was a reaction against what went on in the Gilded Age, trying to reform capitalism and political corruption, looking for ways to protect workers. Interestingly, many progressives did not abandon social darwinism, but carried out these actions in the name of social darwinism and efficiency.
Whew.
Wow, thanks for the info; it really filled in a few holes I had in picturing the eras.