| Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age Contributor(s): O'Donnell, Edward (Author) |
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ISBN: 023112001X ISBN-13: 9780231120012 Publisher: Columbia University Press OUR PRICE: $26.73 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2017 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | United States - 19th Century - History | United States - State & Local - Middle Atlantic (dc, De, Md, Nj, Ny, Pa) - Social Science | Sociology - Urban |
| Dewey: 330.092 |
| Series: Columbia History of Urban Life |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6" W x 8.9" (1.15 lbs) 376 pages |
| Themes: - Chronological Period - 19th Century - Demographic Orientation - Urban - Cultural Region - Mid-Atlantic |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: America's remarkable explosion of industrial output and national wealth at the end of the nineteenth century was matched by a troubling rise in poverty and worker unrest. As politicians and intellectuals fought over the causes of this crisis, Henry George (1839-1897) published a radical critique of laissez-faire capitalism and its threat to the nation's republican traditions. Progress and Poverty (1879), which became a surprise best-seller, offered a provocative solution for preserving these traditions while preventing the amassing of wealth in the hands of the few: a single tax on land values. George's writings and years of social activism almost won him the mayor's seat in New York City in 1886. Though he lost the election, his ideas proved instrumental to shaping a popular progressivism that remains essential to tackling inequality today. Edward T. O'Donnell's exploration of George's life and times merges labor, ethnic, intellectual, and political history to illuminate the early militant labor movement in New York during the Gilded Age. He locates in George's rise to prominence the beginning of a larger effort by American workers to regain control of the workplace and obtain economic security and opportunity. The Gilded Age was the first but by no means the last era in which Americans confronted the mixed outcomes of modern capitalism. George's accessible, forward-thinking ideas on democracy, equality, and freedom have tremendous value for contemporary debates over the future of unions, corporate power, Wall Street recklessness, government regulation, and political polarization. |
Contributor Bio(s): O'Donnell, Edward: - Edward O'Donnell is assocaite professor of history at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (Columbia, 2015) and Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum (Random House, 2003). |