Rutherford B. Hayes
Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society

Questions to consider
1. What was the "gospel of wealth"?
2. Why was there so much conflict between capital and labour in the late nineteenth century?
3. How did the expansion of wage labour change the meaning of freedom and republican citizenship?
4. What did labour unions seek to achieve in the late nineteenth century?

Primary sources
Extract from Andrew Carnegie, The Gospel of Wealth, 1889
Extract from Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879)
Preamble to the Constitution of the Knights of Labor (1881)
extract from Homestead Strikers' song

Introductory reading
Rebecca Edwards, "Money" in New spirits : Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 (2006), pp. 81-103
Leon Fink, ed., Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, pp. 27-45
Charles W. Calhoun, "The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics", in Calhoun, ed., The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America TEACHING COLLECTION MAIN 3280
David B. Sicilia, "Industrialisation and the Rise of Corporations, 1860-1890", in Barney, ed., A Companion to 19th Century America, pp. 138-151 TEACHING COLLECTION MAIN 3299
Lichenstein, Strasser and Rosenweig, Who Built America? Vol. 2, chapter 1, "Progress and Poverty" [Note: there are multiple copies of this textbook in the UCL library]
Eric Foner, "Liberty of Contract and its Discontents", ch. 6 of The Story of American Freedom, TEACHING COLLECTION MAIN 3333


Further reading

Labour
Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-century America (1989), esp. cc. 5, 6.
Herbert Gutman, Work, culture, and society in industrializing America: essays in American working-class and social history (1977)
David Montgomery, The fall of the house of labor: the workplace, the state, and American labor activism, 1865-1925 (1987)
Martin J. Burke, The Conundrum of Class: Public Discourse on the Social Order in America (1995), Intro, ch. 6
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis, pp. 237-92

Urbanisation
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (1978), esp. cc. 8-12.
Eric Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban (1988)

General accounts
Samuel Hays, The Response to Industialisation (1957)
W. Licht, Industrialising America (1995)
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, (1967)
R. Hal Williams, Years of Decision: American Politics in the 1890s (1978)