Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, 1870-1917: Primary Sources

The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader is a wide-ranging anthology of essays, criticism, and fiction first printed in periodicals during those last remarkable years of the nineteenth century, a decade commonly referred to as the “golden age” of periodical culture.
To depict the many changes taking place in the United States at this time, Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson have drawn from an eclectic range of periodicals: elite monthlies such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly; political magazines such as the North American Review and Forum; magazines for general readers such as Cosmopolitan and McClures; and specialized publications including the Chatauquan, Outing, and Colored American Magazine. Authors represented in the collection include Andrew Carnegie, Edith Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane, W. E. B. DuBois, Jacob Riis, and Frederick Jackson Turner. A general introduction to the period, a brief contextualizing essay for each selection, and a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources are provided as well.

Documenting American Violence brings together excerpts from a wide range of sources about incidents of violence in the United States. Each document is set into context, allowing readers to see the event through the viewpoints of contemporary participants and witnesses and to understand how these deeds have been excused, condemned, or vilified by society. Organized topically, this volume looks at such diverse topics as famous crimes, vigilantism, industrial violence, domestic abuse, and state-sanctioned violence. Among the primary sources that describe these events are: Benjamin Franklin's account of the Conestoga massacre, when an entire village of American Indians was killed by the Paxton Boys, a group of frontier settlers, militant abolitionist John Brown's attack on Harpers Ferry, Ida B. Wells's condemnation of lynchings in the South, the massacre of General Custer's 7th Cavalry at Little Bighorn, as witnessed by Cheyenne war chief Two Moon, Nat Turner's confession about the slave revolt he led in Southampton County, Virginia, Oliver Wendell Holmes's diaries and letters from when he was a young infantry officer in the Civil War, a police officer's account of the Haymarket Trials, Harry Thaw's murder of the Gilded Age's most prominent architect, Stanford White, through his own published version of the events, the post-trial, public confessions of Ray Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder of Emmett Till, the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation into the causes of the 1992 riot.

Contents: Zachary Taylor (1849-1850) and Millard Fillmore (1850-1853) -- Franklin Pierce (1853-1857) -- James Buchanan (1857-1861) -- Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) -- Andrew Johnson (1865-1869) -- Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877).

The Rough Riders is a firsthand account of the Spanish American War as witnessed by Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, who was Assistant Secretary of the Navy when the war broke out, promptly resigned and became Lieutenant Colonel of the 1st U.S. Volunteer Cavalry. He collected cowboys, explorers, backwoodsmen, and miners to fight the Spanish on Cuban soil. Roosevelt tells of the group's adventures and defeats and of the excitement of being involved in a war across the sea. John Randolph Jones narrates this account in a quiet manner and employs a minimum of characterization.

A collection of primary source documents on American history beginning with 1860 and ending in 1941.

Covering Columbus to the 21st century, it now includes more than 2,000 primary documents—proclamations, speeches, poems, songs, newspaper and magazine articles, sermons, letters and editorials by the people who made history. In addition to such widely available texts as the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Gettysburg Address, it includes essential works by Jane Addams, Clarence Darrow, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Noah Webster, Walt Whitman and more than a thousand others.

The Historic Documents series makes primary source research easy by presenting in one volume key excerpts from documents relating to the important events of each year for the United States and the world. Each volume includes eighty to ninety documents from a particular year, from official or other influential reports and surveys, to speeches from leaders and other opinion makers, to court cases, legislation, and testimony, and much more.

Offers a unique biographical approach to the study of primary source documents. The 120 entries cover notable Americans from the Revolutionary era to the 21st century, including presidents, senators, diplomats, Supreme Court justices, labor leaders, social activists, first ladies, and religious figures.

Sharply critical of the United States government's cruelty toward Native Americans, this monumental study chronicles the maltreatment of Indians as far back as the American Revolution. Focusing on the Delaware and the Cheyenne, the text also documents and deplores the sufferings of the Sioux, Nez Percé, Ponca, Winnebago, and Cherokee--revealing, in the process, a succession of broken treaties, the government's forced removal of tribes from choice lands, and other examples of inhuman treatment of the nation's 300,000 Indians. Within a year of its 1881 publication, this ever-relevant reference played an instrumental role in the creation of the powerful Indian Rights Association.

This reprint of the briefer version of a book that was originally serialized by from 1902 to 1904 recounts the history of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, the first major industrial monopoly in the US. The story, which became a model for investigative journalists, explores corporate abuses perpetrated by the company.

Published in 1890, Jacob Riis's remarkable study of the horrendous living conditions of the poor in New York City had an immediate and extraordinary impact on society, inspiring reforms that affected the lives of millions of people. Riis's reliance on specific, hard facts as weapons of social criticism pioneered the style of crusading journalism that continues today.

This angry novel created a furor when it was originally published in 1906. The author painfully details the sorrows of a Lithuanian immigrant family working in Chicago's meat-packing plants during the bad old days before worker's compensation and disability, unemployment insurance, social security, fair labor practices, and court-appointed lawyers. In addition to losing their home, the family endure the deaths of a grandfather, an uncle, a child, a mother and her second child (in childbirth), the older children (to the streets), and finally the cherished firstborn son. By exposing the horribly unsanitary practices in the plants, this novel prompted federal legislators to protect the public from unsafe meat.

This muckraking classic attacked corrupt election practices and shady dealings in businesses and city governments across the nation. Taking a hard look at the unprincipled lives of political bosses, police corruption, graft payments, and other notorious political abuses of the time, the book set the style for future investigative reporting.

Civil rights leader and author, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts on February 23, 1868. He earned a B.A. from both Harvard and Fisk universities, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, and studied at the University of Berlin. He taught briefly at Wilberforce University before he came professor of history and economics at Atlanta University in Ohio (1896-1910). There, he wrote The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he pointed out that it was up to whites and blacks jointly to solve the problems created by the denial of civil rights to blacks.

Designed to allow students and general readers to study the American past as historians do, this brief volume provides original documents, an introduction that places those documents in the context of their time, questions for directed inquiry when examining them, and a bibliography for further study. The documents are the principle writings of Ida B. Wells, a leading crusader against the lynching of African Americans in the South in the 1890s. The reprinted works are Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases; A Red Record, and Mob Rule in New Orleans. The 41-page introduction by editor Royce, an experienced scholar of African American women, does a fine job of summarizing Wells's crusading work and places it in the complex of race relations in the Jim Crow South. It also gives insight into perceptions of the role of women in the post-Reconstruction US.

"20 Years at Hull House" by Jane Addams is a surprisingly compelling book, free of the ethnic racism and stereotyping that blight many similar works of her era. Addams' account of her groundbreaking community center in one of the worst parts of late 19th-century Chicago fairly overflows with compassion and almost unbelievable fairness. Jane Addams came from a conventional Middle American milieu, but was radicalized by seeing the ravages of the Industrial Revolution both in Britain and Chicago. This timeless memoir of the years 1889-1909 documents her wide-ranging concerns, embracing public health, pacifism and feminism as well as philanthropy, working-class education and poverty alleviation. Many of the ideas implemented by Addams in her "20 Years at Hull House" decades ahead of their time. While not light reading, this classic contains many gripping portraits of the desperation of immigrant life and the simple power of human decency.