WEBSITES

Gilded Age and Progressive Era Resources
Offering an impressive list of sites, this gateway will point you to online resources on political, cultural, business, immigration, military, and Western history.

Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850–1920
Cookbooks, billboards, trade cards, calendars, leaflets, and more can be viewed at this site from the Library of Congress's American Memory Project. Over 9,000 images from the Duke University Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library are available, as well as a time line and bibliography.

Wounded Knee
The Indian wars ended with an 1890 massacre of 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. This site, developed by Lorie Liggett, a student in the Bowling Green State University American Culture Studies Program, offers introductory information on the attack.

Crucible of Empire: The Spanish-American War
Produced in conjunction with a PBS documentary, this rich, attractively designed site includes a time line, visual and textual primary sources, classroom activities, bibliographies, and suggested links.

America 1900
The American Experience from PBS presents this companion site to its documentary series America 1900. Program and interview transcripts, primary source documents, profiles of people and events, a time line, maps, and suggested readings offer insight into everyday life at the turn of the century.

The Triangle Factory Fire
This outstanding website, developed by Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations, explores the March 25, 1911, Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in New York. In addition to narrating the tragedy and its aftermath, the site offers original documents, oral histories, and photographs.

ONLINE SOURCES

Theodore Roosevelt Electronic Texts
An extensive set of texts by and about Teddy Roosevelt are available on this site from Bartleby.com.

How the Other Half Lives
Jacob A. Riis's 1890 exposé revealed the horrific living conditions of New York's Lower East Side.

"Cross of Gold" Speech by William Jennings Bryan
The "Boy Orator" made his mark with this July 9, 1896, address on monetary policy, which electrified the Democratic National Convention. Bryan became the Democratic presidential candidate at age 36.

Eugene V. Debs: "How I Became a Socialist"
Excerpts of several speeches delivered by the labor leader in the summer of 1896 are offered on this site, created by Professor Rebecca Edwards and students at Vassar College.

Treaty of Paris
The United States became an imperial power with this 1898 agreement ending the Spanish-American War. Spain granted Cuba independence and ceded the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Guam to the U.S.

An American in Bohol, the Philippines
The Philippine-American War—the brutally fought 1899–1902 conflict over Philippine independence—is often called America’s "forgotten war." This site from the Duke University Special Collections Library includes the diary of Army officer George Percival Scriven, written during the first months of the American occupation, as well as photographs and historical background information.

The Souls of Black Folk
In this 1903 landmark work, W. E. B. DuBois introduced the enduring concept of "double-consciousness," which is experienced by African Americans as they struggle to define themselves as both black and American.

On the Trail of the Immigrant
A 1906 book by Edward A. Steiner is the source of this annotated "photo album" of turn-of-the-century immigrants.

Twenty Years at Hull House
The celebrated reformer Jane Addams, who worked on behalf of working-class immigrant city dwellers, relates her experiences as founder and director of a Chicago settlement house in this 1910 memoir.

BOOK PICKS

Search for Order, 1877–1920
In this classic synthesis of the period, Robert H. Wiebe argues that America’s isolated "island communities" were woven into a centralized, organized, modern nation by World War I.

Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917
Matthew Frye Jacobson recasts the period between Reconstruction and World War I as a global era, employing an incredible range of cultural sources to analyze the formation of notions of citizenship and national identity in an international context. Jacobson links histories of immigration and imperialism and explores how these histories were rooted in industrial capitalism.

The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, Volume 3: Transcontinental America, 1850–1915
This installment of D. W. Meinig’s series on historical geography discusses America’s expansion to the Pacific coast, the nation’s rise as a world power, and the effect of the new railways on reunifying the nation.

The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
Covering the South from the 1880s through the early 20th century, this evenhanded, comprehensive synthesis by Edward L. Ayers discusses the history of everyday life, politics, and culture.

Gilded Age

The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age
Beyond the rise of the corporate business structure in the late 19th century, Alan Trachtenberg discusses the advent of stricter social structure and new hierarchies of control. According to Trachtenberg, the growth of capitalist power generated a cultural debate over the definition of America.

Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism
Laura Wexler argues that turn-of-the-century female photographers advanced imperial, racial, and class power through the "domestic vision" of their photographs, which constructed notions of a white, "civilized" America.

Progressive Era

Who Were the Progressives?
It's a tough question, and historians continue to wrestle with it. This set of readings, selected and introduced by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, offers an introduction to the debate, discussing the origins of Progressivism and addressing the history of labor, race, ethnicity, gender, and class.

American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century
Victorian propriety was swept away by the cultural changes introduced by the Greenwich Village avant-garde before World War I, argues Christine Stansell. Her study emphasizes the political in modernist culture and brings women’s history to the forefront.

Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920
This exhaustively researched study by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore focuses on educated, middle-class African American women in North Carolina, whose church and civic activity filled the void as black men were politically disenfranchised under Jim Crow. Gilmore charts new territory in Southern, women’s, and political history, expanding "politics" beyond the white, male realm of the electoral.

The Black Stork : Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915
Chicago surgeon Harry J. Haiselden, a practitioner of "eugenic euthanasia" who allowed the deaths of "defective" infants in his care, publicized his views in the 1916 feature film The Black Stork. Martin S. Pernick uncovers Haiselden’s career and analyzes portrayals of eugenics and euthanasia in the silent film era.

ONLINE ARTICLES

American Women and the Making of Modern Consumer Culture
In this transcript of her lecture at the University at Albany, State University of New York, Kathy L. Peiss discusses women's role in shaping modern consumer culture. The site includes audio files of Peiss's talk and her answers to audience questions.

Empires, Exceptions, and Anglo-Saxons: Race and Rule between the British and United States Empires, 1880–1910
Ideologies of race, nationalism, and governance were invoked to justify or indict the United States's imperial adventures at the turn of the century, says Paul A. Kramer in this article from the Journal of American History.

The Spanish-American War
This overview essay by David Trask, part of the Library of Congress's online exhibit The World of 1898, surveys the war from prelude to aftermath.