The Gilded Age has gained a new importance in US historical memory and imagination since the Occupy Wall Street movement drew national attention to the growing disparities between the wealthiest 1 percent and everybody else. Many have concluded that we now live in a second Gilded Age, and it thus makes sense that historians turn their attention to the first one for parallels to, and even lessons for, our present era. In The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015), Steve Fraser has lamented the absence in our second Gilded Age of great labor movements on the scale of those that characterized the first Gilded Age. In The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order, Leon Fink offers his own, significantly more optimistic, observations of the last Gilded Age for our current one. He...

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