There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.

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In the past decade many “new labor historians” have shifted their emphasis away from a narrowly focused social and cultural history and, without abandoning social historical insights, have reengaged vigorously with political history. In addition to their earlier interest in defining a “working-class politics” and tracing how it fared within the electoral system, labor historians recently have begun to reassess the larger periodizing concepts in political history, including those relating to party formation, political mobilization, political language and ideology, and political culture. The result has been significant progress toward the goal first articulated by Herbert Gutman: to rethink the basic building blocks of American history in such a way as to take full account of the experiences, aspirations, and movements of working people and other subordinate groups studied by social historians.

This book, a sweeping interpretive history of mid-nineteenth-century Chicago, traces the evolution of a modern social order. Combining historical and political detail with a theoretical frame, the book examines the dramatic capitalist transition in Chicago during the critical decades from the 1850s through the 1870s, a period that saw the rise of a permanent wage worker class and the formation of an industrial upper class. The book demonstrates how a new political economy, based on wage labor and capital accumulation in manufacturing, superseded an older mercantile economy that relied on speculative trading and artisan production. The new social movements that arose in this era—labor, socialism, urban populism, businessmen's municipal reform, Protestant revivalism, and women's activism—constituted the substance of a new post-bellum democratic politics that took shape in the 1860s and 1970s. When the Depression of 1873 brought increased crime and financial panic, Chicago's new upper class developed municipal reform in an attempt to reassert its leadership. Setting local detail against a national canvas of partisan ideology and the seismic structural shifts of Reconstruction, this book vividly depicts the upheavals integral to building capitalism.

The rising employment of contingent faculty, once largely ignored, has become a major issue in American academia. Regular faculty, administrators, and the public at‐large have joined their distinct interests to those of contingent faculty in demanding reform. Meanwhile, contingent faculty who would take a full‐time job if available have reached a critical mass. This subgroup is fueling a new social activism. Since 1998, a social movement has taken shape that relies on community‐wide coalitions and directs its demands to the public as well as administrators.