THE GILDED AGE: A HISTORY from BEGINNING to END (kindle) by Hourly History

Published in 2019 by Hourly History. What is popularly known as The Gilded Age (roughly from 1870 to 1900) was more than just an era of ostentatious wealth contrasted with crushing poverty. It was mostly a time if immense cultural and technological change and could easily be considered the beginnings of the modern world. This short e-book does a first-rate job of giving the broad strokes of the amazing breadth of changes - changes to communication with the telephone, to transportation with the increased number of trains, but also with the invention of the automobile. Steel became a common construction material and the first skyscraper was built. None of this industrialization came smoothly, though. The United States went from being an overwhelmingly agrarian society where people worked on family farms or plantations (free, slave, or sharecropper) to being mostly working at paid positions in factories, stores, etc. On top of that, a record amount of immigrants came to th...