Historical Dictionary of the Gilded Age

This series on Historical Dictionaries of U.S. Historical Eras is filling in the blanks, and as noted above, the Gilded Age was an important but often overlooked period.
This dictionary contains articles chosen for their comparative significance to the broad panorama of American history during the Gilded Age. Many important people, issues, and events have been excluded in the interest of brevity. Choices of what to include were subjective, so exclusion does not necessarily indicate insignifi cance. In some cases, collective entries proved more useful than individualized ones. For instance, the entries “Literature,” “Periodicals,” and “The Press” cover most of the major authors, editors, literary movements, books, and influential publications of theGilded Age much more succinctly than several dozen individual entries could. The Gilded Age , which lasted for several decades at the end of the 19th century, has left less of an impression than the previous period of Civil War and Reconstruction or the one that followed, known as the Progressive Era.