This revisionist view of late-nineteenth-century history credits Main Street, not Wall Street, with laying the foundations of modern America
In American history, the prevailing narratives of the tumultuous late-nineteenth century focus on wealthy individuals and tycoons while downplaying the very high social and economic stresses they caused.
The Age of Discontent reveals that it was not the tycoons, but rather the laborers and farmers, who in a great uprising of popular democracy reinvented the nation for the emerging industrial world never imagined by the Founders. Facing conditions far worse than previously documented, they overcame the frayed social safety net and violent opposition to pull off what the labor leader John Mitchell has described as the "Second Emancipation," which addressed a dangerously tilted playing field with government programs and legislation. Based on meticulous primary source research and integrating music, photographs, artworks, and statistical data, this sweeping history places grassroots activists and reformers—many recognized for the first time—at center stage in a fascinating success story of perseverance and commitment.
Table of Contents
Preface: Fables of Identity
Introduction: The Discontented
PART ONE: THE WORLD OF THE DISCONTENTED
Chapter 1. The Grittiest Generation
Chapter 2. Transition Stages Are Always Harsh
Chapter 3. Dark Corners
Chapter 4. A Threat of Endlessness
PART TWO: THE DEEDS OF THE DISCONTENTED
SECTION ONE: The 1870s
Chapter 5. To Advance Agriculture
Chapter 6. To Win Fair Treatment for the Living
Chapter 7. From Some Lofty Height of Vision
SECTION TWO: The 1880s
Chapter 8. In All Things Essential
Chapter 9. To Help and Assist All Employed and Unemployed
Chapter 10. The Reinvention of America
PART THREE: THE LEGACY OF THE DISCONTENTED
Chapter 11. Widening the Gates of Opportunity
Chapter 12. How Much Can You Buy
Conclusion: A Second Emancipation
Note on Sources and List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index
About the Author
Reviews
"Today, we need this book. Brauer's Age of Discontent is the flipside of the Gilded Age, a portrait of those farmers, factory hands, washerwomen, migrants, and land-grant college intellectuals—the men and women who reinvented democracy for the modern world. It's a people's epic written by a brilliant historian"—Joseph Kelly, director of Irish and Irish American studies, College of Charleston, and author, Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin
"A fascinating synthesis of labor and economic history in the late-nineteenth-century United States, The Age of Discontent argues for the importance of overlooked laws and policy changes that successfully reined in the worst excesses of laissez-faire industrial capitalism before the turn of the century. In a book brimming with the stories and experiences of real people, along with groundbreaking insights about the plight of workers during the period, Brauer argues persuasively that ordinary Americans rewrote the rules of their society and gave birth to our modern democracy."—Jeremy Young, Freedom to Read program director, PEN America
About the Author
Ralph Brauer taught American studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and he is the author of The Strange Death of Liberal America (2006). He received a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota.
