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Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction [#223]
Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction [#223]
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  • A vivid portrait of American Progressivism—the reform movement spawned by Gilded Age extravagance—reveals some remarkable parallels between past and present

   
After decades of conservative dominance, the election of Barack Obama may signal the beginning of a new progressive era. But what exactly is progressivism? What role has it played in the political, social, and economic history of America? 
 
This very timely Very Short Introduction offers an engaging overview of progressivism in America—its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. A many-sided reform movement that lasted from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. Progressive national leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald answered the growing call for change. They fought for worker's compensation, child labor laws, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation; they enacted anti-trust laws, improved living conditions in urban slums, instituted the graduated income tax, won women the right to vote, and laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's New Deal. Nugent shows that the progressives—with the glaring exception of race relations—shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed.
  
Offering a succinct history of the broad reform movement that upset a stagnant conservative orthodoxy, this Very Short Introduction reveals many parallels, even lessons, highly appropriate to our own time. 

Index: 

Acknowledgments
List of illustrations
Introduction

1. The predicament: the discontents of the Gilded Age
2. The crisis of the nineties, 1889–1901
3. Progressivism takes shape, 1901–1908
4. The high tide of Progressivism, 1908–1917
5. Calamities: World War I and the flu epidemic, 1917–1919
6. Ebb tide, 1919–1921
References
Further reading
Index

About the author: 

Walter Nugent is a former President of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and former president of the Western History Association. He has taught history at the University of Notre Dame and at Indiana University. He is the author of many books, including The Tolerant Populists; Into the West: The Story of Its People; and Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansion. He lives in Highland Park, Illinois.

Product details

ISBN : 9780195311068

Author: 
Walter T.K. Nugent
Pages
160 Pages
Format
Paperback
Size
111 x 174 mm
Pub date
Dec 2009
Series
Very Short Introductions
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Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction [#223]

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction [#223]

Progressivism: A Very Short Introduction [#223]