Standing at Armageddon
A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era

The period of American history between 1877 and 1919 is often misunderstood as a boring time when nothing really happened. This is not indirectly brought about through excessively complex and abstract economic theory about money supply, sometimes bland political theater, and the gravity of the Civil......more

Reading this for my America from 1877 to 1929 class. So far it is okay, though Mrs. Painter's bias prompted me to cross-read this with a Mark Summers survey. In the first two chapters, she has downplayed the role of technology (actually she is overly negative toward any project that 'exploited' the......more

Of the many lessons to be learned from Painter's book/this historical period, the most important one is that American's used to have class consciousness. Americans were keenly aware (and arguably continued to be up until the late 1970's/early 80's) of the role of class in their lives and every polit......more

A solid introductory text to American history after Reconstruction and through the First World War. A broadly neglected field of American history, this does a nice job of contextualizing that period's social turmoil by linking postwar racial tensions to the burgeoning class and gender problems that......more

The Progressive Era was a time of radical financial, political, industrial, and social revolution in the United States. As told by author Nell Irvin Painter, this time period (1877-1919) was a continuous battle between the workingman and big business, between Democrats and Republicans, and between r......more