| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.1

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| Review | Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive era, 6.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Elongating the Progressive Era

EDWARDS, REBECCA. New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 296 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, study questions, index. $28.00 (paper), ISBN 0-19-514-728-6.
Historians of the United States have long bifurcated the half century after the Civil War (1865–1905) into two chronologically distinct periods: the "Gilded Age" and the "Progressive Era." There is little consensus as to precisely when the first of these periods ended and the second began, or even if the two periods differed in fundamental ways, yet few doubt that such a transition occurred. This periodization is firmly enshrined in textbooks, monographs, and museum exhibits, as well, of course, in the title of the very journal in which you are reading this review. It is, thus, of more than usual interest that, in New Spirits—a fresh and engaging interpretation of U.S. history in the half century between 1865 and 1905—Vassar historian Rebecca Edwards challenges the rationale for this periodization. If Edwards gets her way, historians might well drop the "Gilded Age" from their conceptual lexicon and characterize this entire period as a "long Progressive Era" (7). The late nineteenth century, Edwards posits, was remarkable not only for technological innovations such as the telephone and electric power, but also for its cultural modernity: though this period is often characterized as intellectually sterile, in fact, almost all of the major ideas and thinkers that have come to be associated with the Progressive Era had gained national prominence before 1900 (7). On balance, Edwards contends, the dominant motif in this half-century was continuity rather than change. Whether or not one agrees with this claim, and there is much to recommend it, specialists and non-specialists alike will profit from her cogent critique of the implicit value judgments that have led generations of historians to disparage the "Gilded Age" and idealize the "Progressive Era."	1
New Spirits is designed as a textbook for upper-level undergraduate history courses and includes many elements that make for success in this genre. It is engagingly written, up-to-date, effectively illustrated, and laced with revealing anecdotes about different social groups (Mexicans and Chinese, for example, as well as "Anglos"). The main themes are clearly delineated; each chapter includes a helpful guide to further reading; and the final chapter is followed by two pages of stimulating questions for further discussion. Most importantly, New Spirits is brimming with information on an unusually wide range of topics that can be expected to hold an undergraduate's attention—including sports, religion, and sex. We learn who coined the phrase "WWJD," how Asians became the first illegal immigrants, and why the buffalo almost became extinct. Only time will tell if New Spirits will supplant Robert Wiebe's Search for Order as the indispensable one-volume introduction to the period. If my own experience in teaching several chapters to an audience of high school history teachers is representative, it might well succeed.	2
Like much recent historical writing, New Spirits draws its inspiration less from social science than from cultural studies. Thankfully, Edwards spares her readers the stilted language that renders so much cultural studies scholarship unnecessarily arcane. In large part this is because she draws her organizing metaphors not from academics but from some of our country's most gifted writers. Her title echoes Walt Whitman; her treatment of class stratification (the "wedge"), Henry George. Mark Twain is by no means neglected, yet Edwards politely yet persuasively rejects the sardonic wit that prompted Twain and his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner to dub the post-Civil War era a "Gilded Age" rotten to the core (4). In its place, Edwards substitutes a Whitmanesque faith in the "democratic experiment" that was embraced by the millions of ordinary people yearning for a better world (5).	. . .

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