The Gilded Age

The producer-director Sarah Colt's new documentary describes a society of widespread poverty amid unprecedented plenty—a society in which the richest four thousand families amassed as much wealth as the remaining 11.6 million families combined. No, it is not a survey of the post–great recession United States. Rather, The Gilded Age examines the period between Reconstruction and the end of the nineteenth century, when bloodshed over slavery and civil rights in the postwar South were replaced by new battles—both political and literal—between capital and labor. Wealth inequality, the role of the state, corporate money in politics, a living wage, and how American citizens should deal with the deficiencies of capitalism have recently become the prevailing themes of Occupy Wall Street, Fight for $15, and the movement politics of Bernie Sanders. The Gilded Age presents popular audiences with a cogent account of the past that also speaks to the present by contextualizing the history of material disparities, economic volatility, and class division in American life

Ancient history · Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Economic history · Gilded Age · Political science · Politics · Poverty · State (computer science · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US