From Bloody Shirt to Full Dinner Pail: The Transformation of Politics and Governance in the Gilded Age

A short, elegant overview of politics at the close of the nineteenth century

In the wake of civil war, American politics were racially charged and intensely sectionalist, with politicians waving the proverbial bloody shirt and encouraging their constituents, as Republicans did in 1868, to "vote as you shot." By the close of the century, however, burgeoning industrial development and the roller-coaster economy of the post-war decades had shifted the agenda to pocketbook concerns—the tariff, m...