The present study traces the influences of women students, and the "woman question," on Western Reserve College during its most critical period of transformation during the Gilded Age. In addition, I also aim to build a second, parallel story: the creation of one of the pioneer coordinate colleges for women in the United States: the…

This article outlines the evolution of the relationship between the emergence of large-scale finance and industry in the American Gilded Age and Progressive eras and the shaping and funding of universities by foundations linked to the emerging industries. Scientism has been a means of gaining and maintaining legitimacy and research funding.…

If you have ever attended a town meeting or business lunch, or participated in a church group or department meeting, or served on a faculty senate or maybe just watched C-SPAN, then you have likely encountered "Robert's Rules of Order." This critical edition of Henry M. Robert's essential guide to parliamentary procedure features the…

The article seeks to contribute to working-class and social justice pedagogy by developing concrete angles on teaching/exploring some of the (a) short fiction, (b) journalistic-photographic work and (c) sociography of poverty by the Danish-born US immigrant, muckraker (http://goo.gl/6WeGtM) and social reformer Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914,…

America is witnessing a new gilded age. Since the 1970s, inequality in wealth and income has soared within the United States--and globally (Piketty, 2014; Sayer, 2016; Therborn, 2013). Such inequalities affect human flourishing because they allow the privileged class to convert their wealth into different, and unequal, lifestyles and life chances.…

The placement of schoolhouses provided a forum for animated and often colorful local debate during the late 19th century. Local newspaper editors occasionally interspersed references culled from national educational debates within their columns, indicating that their readers were well aware of the issues and the rhetoric of national politics…

Little known about the now celebrated 1912 Bread and Roses strike is that prominent Progressive-era reformers condemned the strikers as "uncivil" and "violent." An examination of Bread and Roses' controversies reveals how a ruling class enlists middle-class sentiments to oppose social-justice arguments and defend a civil…

In the summer of 1893 financial panic struck Colorado. The price of silver, in a protracted downward spiral since the conclusion of the Civil War, finally crashed. With economic and political turmoil come angry responses, as people search for scape-goats to explain their new and unexpected poverty. And in Gilded Age Colorado, one of those angry…

Teachers of college-level courses on American religious history generally leave out the importance of local and regional histories when telling the story of religion in America. The study of local history provides a fertile ground for understanding broad national trends in a local context. This dissertation focuses upon a little-studied religious…

This is a cutting edge book that not only maps and criticizes venture philanthropy, but also offers a new and different way of conceptualizing public education in response to the neoliberal climate affecting all aspects of public education. This book contains the following chapters: (1) The Trojan School: How Venture Philanthropy is Corporatizing…

This essay recounts Hermann von Helmholtz's trip to represent Germany at the International Electrical Congress in Chicago in 1893 as well as his reception by various members of the American scientific, technological, and cultural elite in several other American cities. In doing so, it seeks to portray something of the vitality of the youthful and…

This article describes the Frank Reade dime novels, published in 1882, that are now recognized as the beginnings of the modern science fiction novel in the United States. They illustrate the hope that Americans of the time held for the future that newly invented technology could offer. Although the Frank Reade stories highlighted the promise of…

In his book titled "Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age," Larry M. Bartels wrote that "the familiar image of a party system transformed by Republican gains among working-class cultural conservatives turns out to be largely mythical." According to Bartels, who is director of Princeton's Center for the Study of Democratic…

Over the three decades between the urban crisis and the credit crisis, New York City revived its economy by making itself the preeminent center for global finance. Manhattan's streetscape and public places rose with the fortunes of the banks and their employees. Wall Street's mood came to define New York City's outlook. In the 1990s and early…

Addresses the impediments involved in teaching the economic history of the Gilded Age. Presents six attributes of industrialization to use when teaching about the Gilded Age that concentrate on the fundamental components of economic change: (1) technology; (2) railroads; (3) corporations; (4) finance capitalism; (5) labor; and (6) retailing. (CMK)