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Age of the robber barons and role of strong, dominant figures in the development of Wall Street, including Gould, Rockefeller, Pierpont Morgan, and Jacob Schiff. Further development of the markets, increasing in size and activity, and the development of securities houses and investment banks.

This chapter examines the Panic of 1873 and its political implications for the Republican Party and the Treasury Department. More specifically, it shows how the Republican defeat in the congressional elections of 1874 led some Republicans to empower the Treasury Department with new forms of regulatory authority. Focusing on the Specie Resumption Act of 1875, the chapter considers the decision of Republicans such as John Sherman and George Edmunds to delegate monetary policy to the Treasury Department after suffering devastating losses in the midterm election of 1874. It argues that the delegation of policy authority to the Treasury Department was a political maneuver in which federal bureaucrats were granted discretion over the money supply in order to insulate the Republicans from electoral retribution.

Chapter 3 examines the aftermath of the war and the new environment in which merchants operated. It argues that a myriad of structural forces aligned to position interior general store merchants at the forefront of the cotton economy. Of particular importance was the collapse of traditional financing, as interior general store owners became the lifeblood of the Southern economy. But success was not guaranteed, nor was it linear. Rather, three distinct periods shaped mercantile life after the war, and the ebbs and flows of these eras very much dictated both when and how businesses could succeed. Businesses that had saved capital during the war year shad the reserves to draw upon when crop failures hit in 1866 and 1867, but new businesses often did not. The fortunes of the region ticked upward between 1868 and 1873, as crop yields and the economy grew and lien laws passed in response to the downturn greatly benefited merchants. These merchants grew their customer bases by working with freedmen, which made logical business sense. But the Panic of 1873 ushered in a period of uncertainty that lasted until 1879 and was accompanied by violence, political instability, disease outbreaks, and other challenges.

This chapter explores the tension that existed in the late nineteenth century between life insurers’ efforts to class individuals into groups and their urge to smooth or average away individual difference. It focuses on the story of Thomas Scott Lambert and his company, American Popular Life, which emphasized the importance of medical classing over actuarial smoothing. The chapter explains Lambert’s business model, built around a medical analog to phrenology that he called biometry, and details the company’s collapse during the Panic of 1873 alongside many of its more conventional peers. It also considers how companies that survived the panic, including Mutual Life of New York and Metropolitan, decided to expand the reach of their companies and thus commodified and quantified many more Americans’ lives. Lambert’s trial for perjury frames the story.

This chapter is a summary of opera production in America from the end of the 1850s, through the Civil War, and into the halcyon postwar period. The beginning of the opera bouffe craze and the activities of light and grand opera companies are examined within the context of the successful foreign-language troupes during and after the war. American soprano Clara Louise Kellogg exemplifies a successful American prima donna who later became the manager of her own English-language company; during these years, however, she sang in Max Maretzek’s Italian-language ensemble. The operatic activity of this chapter is set against the background of a turbulent period of American social and cultural history; the narrative ends just prior to the Panic of 1873.

Newsboys proliferated after the Civil War as the newspaper industry flourished but then reemerged as a social problem during the depression years of 1873 to 1877. Writers and artists such as Horatio Alger and J. G. Brown portrayed them as symbols of the uplifting potential of industrial capitalism, while white southerners turned them into emblems of Republican misrule. The New York press celebrated real Bowery newsboys such as Steve Brodie. But authors of sensational urban guidebooks cast these youths as enfants terribles whose discontents threatened the social order. Swept up in the burgeoning labor movement, newsboys mounted noisy strikes in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis, Nashville, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Baltimore. Catholic and Protestant philanthropists responded by founding homes for newsboys or advocating that they be licensed and supervised. Contrary to their mythic counterparts, real newsboys exposed and challenged the economic inequities of Gilded Age America.

Michael Fitzgerald’s chapter discusses the role of extra-legal violence and armed self-defense as a means for asserting and maintaining Black freedom. By focusing on the local successes in rural western Alabama the chapter challenges an overly simplistic understanding of Reconstruction where whites—notably Ku Klux Klan groups—attack blacks unable or unwilling to defend themselves. The chapter demonstrates that during the catastrophic 1873 depression, circumstances on the ground could turn in against White League-style terrorists. An increasingly uprooted and homeless agricultural work force proved difficult to defeat by paramilitary measures. African Americans in western Alabama understood that their freedom included the freedom to fight back; and they took advantage of that freedom—sometimes successfully enough to prompt the arrival of Federal troops and protection on voting day. These local fights for freedom had impacts across the state.