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| Marvelous narrative that resonatesFor me the essence of history is story telling. Irving Stone, Daniel Boorstein in his American trilogy and David McCullough are in my pantheon of great American historical story tellers. So is H. W. Brands. Professor Brands has personalized American history in over a dozen books. One of my favorites is one of his first: The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s.
Brands bases his scholarship on several hundred books and then concocts a succulent bouillabaisse from the ingredients. The Last Frontier is a fascinating account of how the frontier was closed and why Frederick Jackson Turner was an unlikely, and, initially, scantily recognized, soothsayer of this event. In Morgan We Trust is a vibrant account of the `robber barons' that highlights the highhandedness of this era. How the Other Half Lived, from Jacob Riis, Tammany, and Jane Addams, puts faces on the poverty that affected so many people during the Gilded Age. Blood on the Water, in recounting, Homestead, Pullman, and the railroad confrontations, portrays labor's fights against the immutable power of capitalists and the federal government, and the Supreme Court.
The Matter With Kansas vividly portrays the struggle between `Wall Street' and the farmers and Populists in the West. Plessy V. Crow is a perceptive insight into 19th century racism, with a question as to whether Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois had the better short-term approach. Cross of Gold, Tongue of Silver provides a sympathetic account of how William Jennings Bryan's `cross of gold' would be smashed by Mark Hanna and the eastern establishment. Democratic Imperialism captures the essence of how an `American empire' stumbled ahead through Hawaii and 'a splendid little war,' before the Filipino imbroglio.
Each of these vignettes provides a gut-wrenching appreciation of the struggles, greed, and arrogance of these formative events. In a marvelous epilogue, Professor Brands, writing in the mid-1990s, relates these events to contemporary America. His conclusion is worth repeating:
"A hundred years later, as Americans approach the end of another century, a single verdict on the 1890s' debate between the declinists and the triumphalists remains as problematic as ever. That it does so--that a century of evidence leaves the issue still in doubt--ought to recommend modesty to latter-day debaters on the same subject. Odds are that their debate will be unresolved another century hence. A reader of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire once asked the author for a judgment on Rome's lasting significance. Gibbon replied that it was too soon to tell. Observers of American history--whether that of the 1890s or the 1980s--could do worse than to recall Gibbon." Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome?--The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism continue this dialogue.
I introduced my students to the Gilded Age in 2009 with:
"Something to THINK About
An era in which:
* The courts and the federal administration gave corporations a free hand to do almost anything they wished;
* Banks, through ineptness, greed, and criminal actions, came close to destroying the U. S. financial system;
* Bribery at the federal, state, and local level was so prevalent that it seemed difficult to find an honest politician;
* The federal and state administration, as well as Congress and the Supreme Court, showed scant respect for the rights (and, often, lives) of the common people;
* Some of the largest businesses engaged in massive fraud and deception that continued for years without any significant government intervention;
* Some of the new rich became rich beyond one's wildest imagination--a few achieved this with `relatively clean hands;' others bought politicians and others as if they were commodities in the market place.
* The economy spiraled into a free fall with a number of experts forecasting a prolonged economic depression.
* Wars, that were casually started, soon resulted in a quagmire.
This could be written about 2009. In fact, I am summarizing much of the content of our chapter on the U. S. economy 1870-1900. Two positive differences: in the early 21st century federal and state troops did not intervene in strikes and shoot to kill or wound strikers and the Supreme Court did not uphold such actions."
Reckless no, scholarly and dry yes.This reads as a graduate paper. I forced myself through it because there is information in the text. It is too detailed for a summary read, while not deep enough for an exhaustive study. I was disappointed because some of the author's subsequent books are great.
Fascinating and informativeI'm a novelist who does a lot of research. I needed information about the 1890s in the US. This book totally delivered. The book was thorough and dramatic and interesting.
Very readable history"The Reckless Decade" is a very readable synthesis of biography, social history, intellectual history, and just good old-fashioned storytelling art. Brands's writing style is electric, his wit sharp, and his discretion as to when to use well-chosen quotations and when to render his own pithy judgments seldom erring. A thoroughly enjoyable period history of a time very much like our own.
A Perfect TenH.W. Brands is one of our best popular historians, and he doesn't disappoint with this book about America in the 1890's. He starts the book with two tales that demonstrate the closing of the frontier- the final major land rush in the Oklahoma Territory, which occurred in 1893; and the fighting at Wounded Knee, in the Dakota Territory, in December 1890, which resulted in the deaths of Sitting Bull and many women and children (noncombatants) at the hands of U.S. Army cavalry troops. The Sioux Indians were left demoralized by this event. Professor Brands grabs our attention with the first sentence of the book: "Fred Sutton had watched the earlier rushes into Oklahoma; he had seen friends no smarter, tougher, or more discerning than himself grab homesteads; and when word came that the government in Washington was going to open up the Cherokee Strip to settlement, he determined that this time he'd get a piece of the action." Later on in the chapter, the author switches from the concrete to the philosophical, telling us what thinkers such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Henry and Brooks Adams had to say about the significance of the closing of the frontier. This balance, in addition to the gripping narrative style, is what makes Professor Brands such a good writer. The book is just plain fun to read, but it is also intellectually challenging. Later chapters deal with the growth and centralization of big business (Carnegie and Rockefeller); the importance of the financier (J.P. Morgan); the urban, immigrant poor and the role of the political machines (Tammany Hall); economic downturn and the plight of farmers; racial discrimination and the different philosophies of Black American leaders on how to improve the lives of Black Americans (Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois); the political battle over the Gold Standard vs. bimetallism (the Populist party, William Jennings Bryan); and the exercise of American power abroad (the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt). Professor Brands wrote this book in the mid-1990's and he points out some parallels between the two decades- the most obvious being the tendency of people to begin looking outside the political mainstream during periods of great economic uncertainty. During the 1890's people felt under stress from industrialization, economic centralization and also from the severe depression the country was going through. Americans in the 1990's felt the heat of global competition and the uncertainties involved in the ongoing transition from a manufacturing to a more service based economy. The author gently points out some similarities. He wisely doesn't take the analogy too far. As you can see, the book is brimming over with topics and ideas, but it is always a joy to read- not least because of the many fascinating characters who are portrayed. In the section on the rise of big business, Professor Brands entertains us with the story of the competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Westinghouse originally made his fortune by inventing the railway air brake. When he decided to branch out into electricity, Edison wasn't amused. He muttered to a colleague, "Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes." Edison was working on commercializing direct current, while Westinghouse favored alternating current (which uses higher voltages). To try to influence public opinion, Edison had his technicians wire up stray cats and dogs to the higher voltages and switched on the current. Edison put out pamphlets implying that alternating current would do the same thing to people that it did to the unfortunate animals. And when Westinghouse got the contract to provide the electricity for New York State's "electric chairs," Edison remarked that prisoners could now either be hanged or they could be "Westinghoused." So, apparently "The Wizard Of Menlo Park" didn't spend all of his time inventing. He had a few moments left over to engage in some below-the-belt boxing!
Product Description"Large-scale economic change, job uncertainty, the politics of extremism and paranoia, arguments over America's international role, racial conflicts. Sound familiar?"(Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle) Just as we do today, Americans of the 1890s faced changes in economics, politics, society, and technology that led to wrenching and sometimes violent tensions between rich and poor, capital and labor, white and black, East and West. In The Reckless Decade, H. W. Brands demonstrates that we can learn a lot about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.
The 1890s saw the closing of the American frontier and a shift toward imperialist ambitions. Populists and muckrakers grappled with robber barons and gold-bugs. Americans addressed the unfinished business of Reconstruction by separating blacks and whites. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black leaders clashed over the proper response to continuing racial inequality. Those on top of the economic heap—Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan—created vast empires of wealth, while those at the bottom worked for dimes a day. Brands brings all this to life in a vivid narrative filled with larger-than-life characters facing momentous challenges as they worked toward an uncertain future.
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