Spanning The Gilded Age

The fascinating history of the St. Louis Bridge, the first steel structure in the world. In Spanning the Gilded Age, John K. Brown tells the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge, known popularly as the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any kind—anywhere in the world—built of steel. This history details the origins, design, construction, and enduring impact of a unique feat of engineering, and it illustrates how Americans built their urban infrastructure during the nineteenth century. With three graceful arches spanning the Mississippi River, the Eads Bridge's twin decks carried a broad boulevard above a dual-track railroad. To place its stone piers on bedrock, engineer James Eads pioneered daring innovations that allowed excavators to work one hundred feet beneath the river. With construction scarcely begun, Eads circulated a prospectus—offering a 500 percent return on investment—that attracted wealthy investors, including J. Pierpont Morgan in New York and his father, Junius, in London. This record-breaking design, which employed a novel method to lay its foundations and an untried metal for its arches, was projected by a steamboat man who had never before designed a bridge. By detailing influential figures such as James Eads, the Morgans, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould, Spanning the Gilded Age offers new perspectives on an era that saw profound changes in business, engineering, governance, and society. Beyond the bridge itself, Brown explores a broader story: how America became urban, industrial, and interconnected. This triumph of engineering reflects the Gilded Age's grand ambitions, and the bridge remains a vital transportation artery today.

In United States history, the Gilded Age is a period approximately spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth century; from the 1870s to 1900. The term was coined by Mark TwainThe Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, satirizing what he believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding. The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society. The main action of the story takes place in Washington, D.C., and satirizes the greed and corruption of the governing class. Twain also satirizes the social pretensions of the newly rich. Although more than a century has passed since its publication, the novel's satirical observations of political and social life in Washington, D.C., are still seen as pertinent.

From the man who coined the term "net neutrality" and who has made significant contributions to our understanding of antitrust policy and wireless communications, comes a call for tighter antitrust enforcement and an end to corporate bigness.

The Gilded Age in United States history is a period approximately spanning the final three decades of the nineteenth century; from the end of the Reconstruction Era in the 1870s to 1900. The term was coined by writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which they published in 1873, and which satirized what they believed to be an era of serious social problems disguised by a thin gold gilding.

America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839–1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization.

Set in 1905, against a backdrop of magnificence, excess and corrupting glamour, After the Ball's themes are stunningly fresh: greed and chicanery, flawed love between fathers and sons, and contradictory American attitudes about wealth. Glamorous, cultured and ambitious - but fatally young and naïve - James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899. Five years later, at the pinnacle of social and financial success, he made a fatal miscalculation, and set in motion the first great Wall Street scandal of the twentieth century. On the last night of January 1905, Hyde gave one of the most fabulous balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused of charging the party to his company, he was sucked into a maelstrom of allegations of corporate malfeasance that involved the era's most famous financiers and industrialists. “Wonderfully foreboding...exactly on pitch...a textured and compelling tragedy”—USA Today

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America. At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences -- ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political -- divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive. These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change -- technological, cultural, and political -- proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country. In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.

The income share of the top one percent of the population in the United States has increased from a little over nine percent of national income in the 1970s to 22.46 percent in 2012 a 144 percent increase. What is driving this astronomic growth in incomes for some? Is it possibly the result of non-meritorious forces? If so, how has this incredibly unequal development coexisted, and indeed worsened, in a political system based on equality? In Economic Inequality and Policy Control in the United States, Stelzner tackles each of these questions, and, in order to further develop understanding, Stelzner looks to the past and analyzes our experience with income inequality and the orientation of laws and institutions from the Gilded Age through the New and Fair Deal. He concludes that we have the tools to tackle inequality at present the same policies we used during the New and Fair Deal. However, in order to make change durable, we have to eliminate the undemocratic elements of our political system.