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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Richard Bensel
Richard Bensel
Affiliation:
Cornell University
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Extract

Before engaging the critiques and recommendations that Rebecca Edwards and Richard John have so forcefully and provocatively offered us, we should remind ourselves of what is at stake in this debate. And what is at stake is simultaneously “a little” and “a lot.” And that is because periodization schemes are as much a creature of academic sociology as they are intellectual and analytic constructs. As the several references to "textbook chapters" in these essays indicate, nothing is more central to the construction of American history as an intellectual and academic community than the textbook used in undergraduate survey classes.

Type
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 481 - 485
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2009

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References

page 482 note 1 Tindall and Shi, for example, entitle their chapter 22 “Gilded Age Politics and Agrarian Revolt.” At the same time, chapter 20 (“Big Business and Organized Labor”) in their volume nominates Jay Gould as the “prince of the railroad robber barons,” yet does not stress corruption and fraud, while describing the entrepreneurial and organizational achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. In Henretta et al., America, there are references in several chapters to the “Gilded Age,” but these neither dominate the narrative nor do they stress corporate greed and fraud as an underlying theme. Yet the authors also do not devote much space to industrialization as organizational innovation or economic expansion. They prefer, instead, to focus on the social history of the period, particularly workers and labor unions.