The Gilded Age goes live

After much anticipation The Gilded Age is now live!  The first release contains 23,000 pages of fully searchable text and dozens of secondary material including critical documentary essays, video interviews, and audio recordings. These materials are frequently rare and hard-to-find, and include songs, letters, photographs, cartoons, government documents, and ephemera. Also, check out the Browse Chronology section to see the interactive time line of the period.

Spanning from 1865 to 1902, The Gilded Age provides insight into the key issues that shaped America in the late nineteenth century, including race and ethnicity, immigration, labor, women's rights, American Indians, political corruption, and monetary policy. Regular updates of The Gilded Age collection ensure an ever-expanding wealth of fully searchable resources. Essential primary materials have been gathered from a large number of libraries, museums, and archives, including the Newberry Library, the Chicago Historical Society, and the Illinois State Library. Researchers will find especially useful an extensive bibliography, developed especially for and exclusive to this collection, and video interviews of leading historians such as Maureen Flanagan (Michigan State University), Michael Kazin (Georgetown University), and James Gilbert (University of Maryland).

To supplement the primary material and to facilitate the teaching of research using primary sources at the university level, the database also includes a collection of critical documentary essays. Compiled by leading scholars in the field and assembled around a major theme or research question, each critical documentary essay consists of twenty to thirty annotated primary-source documents, linked together by an original interpretive essay that provides historical context and insight into the sources. Among the scholars who have created critical documentary essays for The Gilded Age are Samuel Thomas of Michigan State University, Christopher Reed of Roosevelt University, Kim Warren of the University of Kansas, and Daniel Thorp of Virginia Tech. The result of their efforts is a highly visual, annotated record
of this critical period in American history.

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