The Age of Discontent: How Workers and Farmers Reinvented American Democracy

This revisionist view of late-nineteenth-century history credits Main Street, not Wall Street, with laying the foundations of modern America

In American history, the prevailing narratives of the tumultuous late-nineteenth century focus on wealthy individuals and tycoons while downplaying the very high social and economic stresses they caused.

The Age of Discontent reveals that it was not the tycoons, but rather the laborers and farmers, who in a great uprising of popular democracy reinvented the nation for the emerging industrial world never imagined by the Founders. Facing conditions far worse than previously documented, they overcame the frayed social safety net and violent opposition to pull off what the labor leader John Mitchell has described as the "Second Emancipation," which addressed a dangerously tilted playing field with government programs and legislation. Based on meticulous primary source research and integrating music, photographs, artworks, and statistical data, this sweeping history places grassroots activists and reformers—many recognized for the first time—at center stage in a fascinating success story of perseverance and commitment.

© 2025 Georgetown University Press (Ebook): 9781647124953

Release date

Ebook: 1 April 2025