C harles P ostel . Equality

As the past four decades have featured a historic widening of inequality in US society, observers have turned to the late nineteenth century for an apt and revealing comparison to our own gilded age. Post–Civil War America was similarly characterized by the emergence of new economic, political, and social structures that gave shape to deepening inequalities by the turn of the century. Those structures existed in uneasy and at times explosive tension with a range of egalitarian social and political movements that emerged in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Charles Postel’s Equality: An American Dilemma, 1866–1896 offers an ambitious and illuminating tour of several of that era’s formative struggles over the meanings and ends of equality. Imaginatively exploring the histories of the Grange, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the Knights of Labor, and the Populists, Postel is alert to the interplay between and among movements as well as...

Dilemma · Economic history · Gilded Age · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American History and Culture · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law · Philosophy