Recommended Reading

On politics, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2000); Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture: A Social Analysis of Midwestern Politics, 1850–1900 (1970); Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (1986); Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life (1991); Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (1997); Xi Wang, The Trial of Democracy: Black Suffrage and Northern Republicans, 1860–1910 (1997); Gretchen Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks (1997); Steven P. Reti, Silver and Gold: The Political Economy of International Monetary Conferences, 1867–1892 (1998); Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (2000); Marilyn P. Watkins, Rural Democracy (1995); Bess Beatty, A Revolution Gone Backward: The Black Response to National Politics, 1876–1896 (1987); and R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (1978).

Biographies of the era’s personalities include Allan Nevins, Grover Cleveland (1932); Robert W. Cherny, A Righteous Cause: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (1985); Ari Arthur Hoogenboom, The Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (1988); and Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of William McKinley (1981).

On Populism, see Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism (1983); Robert C. McMath, Jr., Populist Vanguard (1975) and American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (1993); Victoria Saker Woeste, The Farmer’s Benevolent Trust: Law and Agricultural Cooperation in Industrial America, 1865–1945 (2000); Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (1999); Marion K. Barthelme, ed., Women in the Texas Populist Movement (1997); Barton C. Shaw, The Wool-Hat Boys: Georgia’s Populist Party (1984); Scott G. McNall, The Road to Rebellion (1988); Theodore R. Mitchell, Political Education in the Southern Farmers’ Alliance, 1887–1900 (1987); O. Gene Clanton, Kansas Populism: Ideas and Men (1969), Populism: The Humane Preference in America, 1890–1900 (1991); Congressional Populism and the Crisis of the 1890’s (1999); and Stanley B. Parsons, The Populist Context: Rural Versus Urban Power on a Great Plains Frontier (1973).

Social and labor unrest is covered in Almont Lindsey, The Pullman Strike (1942); Stanley Buder, Pullman (1967); Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs (1982); and Shelton Stromquist, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Labor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (1987).