High school and college survey courses in American history often give relatively little attention to the Gilded Age compared with their coverage of other eras in the nation's past. Sandwiched between the Civil War and the Progressive Era, the period is frequently slighted by instructors who don't quite "get to it" or who rush through it to give more coverage to the seemingly more momentous early twentieth century. Unlike such phrases as the "Early National Period" or the "Age of Jackson," the "Gilded Age" is nearly unique as a period label in its connotation of denigration. The name itself evokes notions of crassness, superficiality, pretense, and fraud.

As is well known, the term derives from the title of a novel published by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. Responding to a dare from their wives, Twain and Warner wrote the book in four months, with the purpose, Twain said, of satirizing an "all-pervading speculativeness" in business and "shameful corruption" in politics (1). Although the authors wrote in the broadest sort of caricature, twentieth-century scholars adopted their title as a fitting descriptor for the period. This was unfortunate, for the term's insinuation of selfishness and sham has masked the period's enormous complexity and significance, and it has led to a facile dismissal of the era as somehow unworthy of serious study. In reality, of course, the United States experienced a profound transformation during these years, with lasting implications for the century that followed.

In the last generation, many historians have undertaken a reevaluation of the Gilded Age, not to deny the era's problems but rather to assess their true nature. Indeed, the portrait emerging from this work shows the period to be one of substantial accomplishment. While not denying the greed and self-indulgence of many of the so-called robber barons, modern scholars emphasize their achievements in criss-crossing the nation with railroads, building factories, and transforming the country's local and rural economy into a national, integrated, industrialized one. In agriculture, Americans achieved unheard of rates of production; indeed, it was the farmers' very success that led to their economic difficulty--a paradox they still confront.

A byproduct of increased agricultural productivity was the abandonment of the countryside by many rural folk who, along with millions of European immigrants, swelled the population of rapidly growing cities. Much of the urban growth was unplanned and entailed a good deal of overcrowding, squalor, disease, and danger. Thought to be locked in the grasp of bosses, city government came in for severe criticism by contemporaries and later scholars. Again, new studies are changing this view. Evidence now indicates that, from the beginning, alongside the George Washington Plunkitts there were reformers and others who labored to make the cities livable through honest and fair government, creating water and sewage systems, lighted streets, public transportation, construction codes, libraries, and parks. Indeed, one recent study hails city government in the Gilded Age as an "unheralded triumph" (2).

Similarly, few scholars working in the period now accept the old stereotype of national politics as a venal battle for office between two parties that had no substantive differences between them. To be sure, some graft occurred at the national level, but recent history reminds us that few if any periods in our past have been entirely free of corruption or wrong-doing. The fact is that most politicians who held national office in the Gilded Age were sincere, dedicated, hardworking public servants, if not inspiring charismatic crusaders. Many studies also show that far from being Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the Democratic and Republican parties exhibited definite ideological differences regarding the nature of government and its role in society. Moreover, although divided control of Congress by the two parties often inhibited passage of legislation, there were important accomplishments, including the creation of a reasonably stable monetary system and the beginning of federal regulation with the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

Finally, the Gilded Age is often criticized for its cultural sterility or inanity. In fact, as is true of any period, high culture and popular culture battled for the public consciousness. What distinguished the era was the great boost given to popular culture by new and inexpensive printing methods and by other advances in communication and transportation. A democratization of culture inevitably led to appeals to broader and, hence, lower tastes. But this is not to say that high culture surrendered. Magazine and book publication experienced tremendous growth. Improved transportation permitted more Americans to journey to expositions, museums, and theaters at the urban centers of culture, and it enabled traveling exhibits and touring companies to fan out to the hinterland. In addition, one of the byproducts of industrialization and the growth of capitalist enterprise was the willingness of business leaders such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller to fund museums, libraries, universities, and other nurseries of culture. The Gilded Age produced much that was ugly, but one cannot dismiss as a cultural wasteland any age that boasted Mark Twain and Henry James, William Dean Howells and Stephen Crane, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sergeant, Richard Morris Hunt and Henry Hobson Richardson.

The essays and lesson plans that follow offer a glimpse at some new ways of envisioning the Gilded Age. The first piece traces the origin and evolution of the stereotyped view of Gilded-Age politics and its replacement by more modern conceptions. Rebecca Edwards takes a look at the era's political life through the medium of cartoons, and she also offers a lesson plan applying this approach to the election of 1896. Ballard Campbell shares his insights on ways to bring late-nineteenth-century economic history to life for modern students. The eminent immigration historian Roger Daniels challenges old notions regarding discontinuities between the so-called Old and New Immigration in this period. Rita Koman builds on Daniel's article with a lesson plan that lets students recreate the trauma and turmoil of the immigrants' arrival at Ellis Island. As a counterpoint to Campbell's look at business, Bruce Lesh presents a lesson plan that challenges students to evaluate the issues raised by the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Ted Dickson's lesson encourages instructors to turn the classroom into an "art museum" where students can evaluate and interpret some of the era's foremost works of art. Tera W. Hunter offers suggestions for including African Americans in the teaching of the Gilded Age with her lesson on the Washerwomen's Strike of 1881. Finally, D. Antonio Cantu and Nina Mjagkij utilize a Multiple Intelligences approach in a lesson that touches on eight major themes of the era.

Endnotes

1. Mark Twain, quoted in John A. Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 1.

2. Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

Charles W. Calhoun is a professor of history at East Carolina University and a past president of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. His latest book is The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America (1996).