The most recommended Gilded Age books

If you’re tired of historians spoon-feeding you their interpretations of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, this great selection of the period’s documents provides an unfiltered look at what people were thinking and doing at the time in their own words. The documents are arranged thematically with four or five per section: The New South; The New West; Native Americans; Big Business; Gilded Age Society; Working People, Immigrants in the Industrial Age; Populism; The Coming of Jim Crow; Labor Protest Rebuilding American Institutions; The Political System; Imperialism and Anti-imperialism, and the Debate about World War I. This is a user-friendly collection that doesn’t go too deep into any one person or event, yet introduces the key issues of the period.

This is not a book on techniques of accounting for M&A, but about why governments need to hold to account large companies seeking dominance of markets through M&A and other means.

It explores the socially harmful impacts of some mergers, such as exacerbating inequality and subverting democracy. It is rich in case evidence and combines law and economics in a vigorous, lucid critique of past governments’ permissive attitudes towards corporate merger. Wu has acted as Special Assistant to President Biden on competition policy.

I re-read this book for research because my next book will be based in New York’s Gilded Age—around the turn of the last century. Edith Wharton’s style of writing is lyrical, descriptive, and beautiful. The characters are brilliantly drawn.

Newland Archer’s struggle between loyalty to his wife and traditional old New York society and his fascination with the deliciously foreign, forward-thinking Countess Olenska is perceptively drawn and compelling. Wharton brilliantly describes the changing landscape, how Old New York fought to hold onto its values while brash new money crashed onto the scene to change it forever.

I cried at the end. It’s so touching. So human. She’s one of my all-time favourite writers, with Daphne du Maurier.

Winders captures the hardening racial attitudes of America’s “Gilded Age” and white society’s embrace of segregation and exploitation in his study of one of the all-time great fighters.

A man of contradictions, George Dixon would become a famous world champion and one of North America’s richest and most popular Black men. Dixon would also die of alcoholism, destitute, alone, and forgotten. Winders claims that, to the then fledgling Black culture in North America, “Dixon was the single-most significant athlete of nineteenth century.”

Yet at the same time, he was a man “who could be indifferent to his race.” Satisfied to live in a white world that celebrated him while he was winning, Dixon found that that same world could turn on him when he was too successful. His gory victory over Jack Skelly in the 1892 Carnival fight in New Orleans put an end to mixed race fights in the… show more.

This series is actually set in Newport, Rhode Island but New York’s elite had to have somewhere to go when the summer heat settled on the city. Reporting on all the Newport society news is Emma Cross, second cousin to Cornelius Vanderbilt. I have to admit that I’m fascinated by the lives of these uber-wealthy characters. Their homes, wardrobes, and entertainments are almost shocking in their opulence. I love that many of the characters are real people. In this book, Alva Vanderbilt loses any hope of winning the Mother-of-the-Year award as she browbeats her daughter Consuelo into marrying heir to the Duke of Marlborough. If money can’t buy happiness, maybe a title will.

Davis takes you on an engrossing adventure into New York’s past—and present—that encompasses mystery, history, suspense, unexpected romances, real family drama, art, heroines generations apart, feminism, and so much more, evoking one’s every emotion.

Her skillful combination of fact and fiction is brilliant, and I thoroughly enjoyed the thrilling exposés of buried secrets of the Gilded Age. I fell in love with Davis's descriptions of the artwork and the strong women involved in making the Frick Mansion/Museum a New York icon. I wanted to get on the next plane to New York and feel their spirits that she so believably described, and as an artist, myself, revel again in the esteemed artwork there!

Jurgis Rudkus, the protagonist of Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle, is a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century to work in the city’s notorious meat-packing industry.

Described as a “very steady man” who “does not easily lose his temper,” Jurgis reminds me of my father, Jerry. Like Jurgis, my father’s solution to most of life’s problems is to just work harder, regardless of the personal consequences.

In the novel, Jurgis injures himself on the job and Sinclair captures not only his physical agony but the more formidable dread of not being able to provide for his family, the working-man’s greatest fear.

Often panned for over-politicizing Jurgis’s plight, The Jungle elevates an anonymous member of the laboring class and presents him as a symbol of virtue, valor, and hope.

While I found Joanna Shupe from her Regency books, I heard an interview with her in which she talked about trying to write about the Gilded Age, but no publisher would take it. So to support her dream, I choose the first of her Gilded Age series—an opposites attract novel between an uptown girl and a downtown guy who works for her father and has some secrets. The spice level in this is steamy rather than erotic. I picked this because I will read a Robin Hood story with romance every time.

Maya Rodale always writes strong, clever heroines, and this book features one of her very best. Beatrice Goodwin has been tossed around by life, but she’s come home to her first love: Goodwin’s, her family’s once-fashionable department store in Gilded Age New York City. The one person standing in the way of her plans to make it the finest store in New York… her other first love, Wes Dalton, whose heart she broke years ago. He wants revenge. She wants her store. They’re both smart, funny, and oh so good at their shared profession, you know they’ll be unstoppable together.

This 1974 book, by the founder of one of the world’s great picture libraries, was a real eye-opener to me when I first read it. We are all nostalgic and look at the past through rose-tinted glasses, and so do I. But then we forget about the hunger and the crime, tuberculosis, smallpox and heaps of trash on the streets, the child labor, and the despair of the aged. This richly illustrated book, with its multitude of stories, set me straight. For instance, did you know that New York had 150,000 horses in 1900, each producing around 20 pounds of manure a day? The past stank. It makes you deeply grateful for science, technology, and economic growth.