Ohio State Newark: History 3014 - Gilded Age to Progressive Era, 1877-1920

Napoleon Sarony was once one of the most famous names in American photography. During the Gilded Age, his grand portrait studio with its one-story-high marquee reproducing the photographer's signature in golden letters was a New York City landmark visited by celebrities such as Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, and Mark Twain. Sarony's story represents a central chapter in the history of photography. Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures documents Sarony's career as New York City's premier portrait photographer and details a moment when the birth of celebrity culture and growth of mass media helped promote popular acceptance of photography as fine art. Sarony's larger-than-life public image was crucial to demonstrating photography's creative potential. At a time when photographers were commonly regarded as straitlaced entrepreneurs or technicians, Sarony circulated self-portraits in outlandish costumes to assert himself as a flamboyantly eccentric artist. These photographic performances forged an authoritative link between the so-called father of artistic photography in America and the stylish celebrity portraits that emerged from his studio by the tens of thousands. Reconstructing Sarony's biography and bringing to light never-before-published portraits, Erin Pauwels provides an illuminating view of how one artist's quest for creative recognition fueled the rise of celebrity culture and artistic photography in the United States. This book will appeal to historians of photography and nineteenth-century American visual culture, as well as anyone interested in this master of the medium of photography and his celebrity subjects.

New perspectives from leading scholars on a defining age in American Jewish history The thematic essays in Yearning to Breathe Free each use a primary source--a book, newspaper, tract, or artwork--as an entry point into Gilded Age America and as a means to introduce key themes, figures, and developments within the era. Covering topics ranging from art, music, and literature to politics, medicine, and religion, these illuminating essays highlight patterns and trends that demonstrate how the Gilded Age shaped Jewish life in the twentieth century. Collectively, they provide a panoramic look at this critical period in American Jewish history. The contributors are Samantha Baskind (Cleveland State University), Judah M. Cohen (Indiana University), David G. Dalin (Brandeis University), Noah Efron (Bar-Ilan University), Zev Eleff (Gratz College), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Melissa R. Klapper (Rowan University), Michael P. Kramer (Bar-Ilan University), Alan M. Kraut (American University), Eli Lederhendler (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Adam D. Mendelsohn (University of Cape Town), Pamela S. Nadell (American University), Heather S. Nathans (Tufts University), Shari Rabin (Oberlin College), Jonathan D. Sarna (Brandeis University), M. M. Silver (Max Stern Yezreel Valley College), Daniel Soyer (Fordham University), Benjamin Steiner (Trinity College), Beth S. Wenger (University of Pennsylvania), and Shira Wolosky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.

On August 11, 1991, a New York Times article on Tuxedo Park in the real estate section stated, "King Arthur's Camelot, Du Maurier's Manderley, Coleridge's Xanadu - Tuxedo Park in Orange County, N.Y., has one leg up on these lands of myth and romance: it exists. ..."

Another New York Times article in June of 2000 quoted a resident who said living in Tuxedo Park recalled life in the Lakes District in England; yet another likened it to "Lake Garda in northern Italy." Learn of the "Millionaire", the express train that would take resident members of the Tuxedo Club into New York City to their offices and back after the close of the banks and stock market. It is a story of the creation of the Wee Wah Beach Club by those who built and served these grand estates. The outgrowth of this story of a small community mirrors the social changes that have taken place in America, but the book questions if we are heading back to a time when the disparity between social classes is rapidly returning and the gap between the ultra-rich and other Americans has returned today.

Do presidents matter for America's economic performance? We tend to stereotype the Gilded Age presidents of the late nineteenth century as weak. We also assume that the American people were intellectually misguided about the economy and the government's role in it during this era. And we generally dismiss the Gilded Age macro-economy as boring--little interesting or important happened. Instead, the micro-economics of the business world was where the action was located. More broadly, many economists and political scientists believe that individual presidents do not matter much, even in the twenty-first century. Institutional constraints and historical circumstance dictate success or failure; the White House is just along for the ride. In Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times, Mark Zachary Taylor shows that all of this is mistaken. Taylor tells the story of three decades of Gilded Age economic upheaval with a focus on presidential leadership--why did some presidents crash and burn, while others prospered? It turns out that neither education nor experience mattered much. Nor did brains, personal ethics, or party affiliation. Instead, differences in presidential vision and leadership style had dramatic consequences. And even in this unlikely period, presidents powerfully affected national economic performance and their success came from surprising sources, with important lessons for us today.