The Reckless Decade

"Beautifully written and wonderfully absorbing, The Reckless Decade is the most accessible survey history of America's turbulent 1890s ever composed."-Douglas Brinkley

Just as we do today, Americans of the 1890s faced changes in economics, politics, society, and technology that led to wrenching and sometimes violent tensions between rich and poor, capital and labor, white and black, East and West. In The Reckless Decade, H. W. Brands demonstrates how we can learn about the contradictions that lie at the heart of America today by looking at them through the lens of the 1890s.

H. W. Brands holds the Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University. He is the author, most recently, of The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin and The Strange Death of American Liberalism.

"Large-scale economic change, job uncertainty, the politics of extremism and paranoia, arguments over America's international role, racial conflicts. Sound familiar?" (Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle) "Beautifully written and wonderfully absorbing, The Reckless Decade is the most accessible survey history of America's turbulent 1890s ever composed." - Douglas Brinkley "Brands injects a needed dose of reality into the sunnier images of the era of Lillian Russell and Diamond Jim Brady." - Jules Wagman. The Plain Dealer "A first-rate overview of an age that, Brands correctly believes, has specific meaning for our own....[1]n The Reckless Decade the story, not the storyteller, is at the center, which is as it should be. Brands knows how to write narrative and how to make the complex comprehensible." - Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World