The New Nation

The military successes of the United States in its Civil War maintained the Union, but entailed readjustments in politics, finance, and business that shifted the direction of pu...

The activity of the North and the East between 1861 and 1865 was imitated and magnified among the youthful communities that made up the western border and ranged in age from a f...

The eight Southern States whose votes were cast in 1868 were far different from the States of the same names in 1860, and were, like the three still outside the Union, largely u...

"Are not all the great communities of the Western World growing more corrupt as they grow in wealth?" asked a critical and thoughtful journalist, Edwin L. Godkin, in 1868, as he...

The reelection of Grant in 1872 was almost automatic. No new issue had forced itself into politics to stir up the old party fires or light new ones. The old issues had begun to...

A great commercial revival, affecting the whole United States, began during the Administration of Hayes. Ingersoll had predicted it, in defining his candidate in 1876, when he d...

Garfield died before he met his first Congress, the Forty-seventh, which was elected with him in 1880, but he lived long enough to foresee the first chance to do party business...

The Administration of Chester A. Arthur proved that the President had never been so discreditable a spoilsman as the reformers had believed, or else that he had changed his spot...

Five statutes that received the signature of Grover Cleveland are documentary proof of the new problems and the changing attitude of the National Administration during the eight...

Transportation was a fundamental factor in the two greatest problems of the eighties. In the case of the disappearance of free land and the frontier, it produced phenomena that...

The Republican protective policy had its strongest supporters among the industrial communities of the East where the profits of manufacture were distributed. In the West, where...

The Old South, in which two parties had always struggled on fairly equal terms, was destroyed during the period of the Civil War, while reconstruction failed completely to reviv...

The election of 1890 stunned and bewildered both old parties. The Republicans lost their control of the Lower House, while the Democrats paid for their victory the price of a pa...

Serious students of finance are almost unanimous in their belief that the adoption of free silver would have brought into operation the Gresham Law and would have resulted in a...

The mission of Populism did not end when free silver had been driven like a wedge into all the parties. Its more fundamental reforms outlasted both the hard times and the recove...

Cuba broke out in one of her numerous insurrections in 1895. The island had been nominally quiet since the close of the Ten Years' War, in 1878, but had always been an object of...

Out of the humiliating debates upon the war, on the capacity of Alger and Shafter, on the management of the commissary and the field hospitals, on the failure of Sampson and Sha...

The panic of 1893 ended the first period of the trust problem. The preceding years had been years of formation and experiment. They had been accompanied by an increasing popular...

Before Roosevelt was inaugurated for his second term, the national "revival," in which he and Bryan and other preachers of civic virtue had played the speaking parts, was sweepi...

The process of adjusting national administration and laws, to meet the needs of life and business that knew no state lines, had been begun during the Roosevelt period. For its c...