Description: Textbooks may interpret history, but the books in the Pages from History series are history. Each title, compiled and edited by a prominent historian, is a collection of primary sources relating to a particular topic of historical significance. Documentary evidence -- including news articles, government documents, memoirs, letters, diaries, fiction, photographs, and facsimiles -- allows history to speak for itself and turns every reader into a historian. Headnotes, extended captions, sidebars, and introductory essays provide the essential context that frames the documents. All the books are amply illustrated and each includes a documentary picture essay, chronology, a further reading list, source notes, and index.

The Gilded Age is remembered as a period whose "golden" veneer failed to mask the craven materialism, unbound greed, and venal politics lying at its heart. Using a wide variety of documents (letters, journals, advertisements, maps, government documents, etc.), Janette Greenwood expands this limited image of late 19th-century America, drawing the true portrait of an age of extremes. Rapid industrialization was coupled with cycles of crushing unemployment. Unprecedented accumulation of wealth co-existed with dire poverty. Wave after wave of immigrants came from Europe, diversifying American society and culture. Minority groups were repeatedly subject to racially motivated violence, yet the late 19th century was also the time when social activism became a power to be reckoned with.

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