The Reckless Decade - by H W Brands (Paperback)

About the Book

A famous historian demonstrates that one can learn a lot about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.

Book Synopsis

A rousing history that Douglas Brinkley called "the most accessible survey of America's turbulent 1890s ever composed"

Just as we do today, Americans of the 1890s faced changes in economics, politics, society, and technology that led to wrenching and sometimes violent tensions between rich and poor, capital and labor, white and black, East and West. In The Reckless Decade, H. W. Brands demonstrates that we can learn a lot about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.

The 1890s saw the closing of the American frontier and a shift toward imperialist ambitions. Populists and muckrakers grappled with robber barons and gold-bugs. Americans addressed the unfinished business of Reconstruction by separating blacks and whites. Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and other black leaders clashed over the proper response to continuing racial inequality. Those on top of the economic heap--Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan--created vast empires of wealth, while those at the bottom worked for dimes a day. Brands brings all this to life in a vivid narrative filled with larger-than-life characters facing momentous challenges as they worked toward an uncertain future.

From the Back Cover

"Beautifully written and wonderfully absorbing, The Reckless Decade is the most accessible survey history of America's turbulent 1890s ever composed."-Douglas Brinkley

Just as we do today, Americans of the 1890s faced changes in economics, politics, society, and technology that led to wrenching and sometimes violent tensions between rich and poor, capital and labor, white and black, East and West. In The Reckless Decade, H. W. Brands demonstrates how we can learn about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.

Review Quotes

"[A] first-rate overview of an age that, Brands correctly believes, has specific meaning for our own. . . . In The Reckless Decade the story, not the storyteller, is at the center,
which is as it should be. Brands knows how to write narrative and how to make the complex comprehensible."--Jonathan Yardley "Washington Post"

"Beautifully written and wonderfully absorbing, The Reckless Decade is the most accessible survey history of America's turbulent 1890s ever composed."--Douglas Brinkley

"Large-scale economic change, job uncertainty, the politics of extremism and paranoia, arguments over America's international role, racial conflicts. Sound familiar?--Fritz Lanham "Houston Chronicle"

About the Author

H. W. Brands holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. He is the author, most recently, of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and The Strange Death of American Liberalism.