Often Gilded-Age politics has been described as devoid of content or accomplishment, a mere spectacle to divert voters from thinking about the real issues of the day. But by focusing too closely on dramatic scandals and on the foibles of prominent politicians, many historians have tended to obscure other aspects of late nineteenth-century politics that proved to be of great and long-term significance. With the latest scholarship in mind, Professor Cherny provides a deft and highly readable analysis that is certain to help readers better understand the characteristics and important products of Gilded-Age politics. Topics covered include: voting behavior; the relation between the popular will and the formation of public policy; the cause and effect of the deadlock in national politics that lasted from the mid-1870s to the 1890s; the sources of political innovation at state and local levels; and the notable changes wrought during the 1890s that ushered in important new forms of American politics.

This is a study of the development of Clement Attlee and the Labour Party from the collapse of the second Labour Government in August 1931, to their entry into Churchill's coalition in May 1940. It is an examination of how Labour, from being driven from office as unfit to govern, recovered to be seen as essential to the effective prosecution of the war, and how Attlee emerged from relative obscurity to become a central figure in the War Cabinet.

An in-depth look at the diverse group of men who comprised Britain’s first Labour Party in 1924. In January of 1924, the cabinet of the first Labour government consisted of twenty white, middle-aged men, as it had for generations. But the election also represented a radical departure from government by the ruling class. Most members of the administration had left school by the age of fifteen. Five of them had started work by the time they were twelve years old. Three were working down the mines before they entered their teens. Two were illegitimate, one was abandoned at birth, and three were of Irish immigrant descent. For the first time in Britain’s history, the cabinet could truly be said to represent all of Britain’s social classes. This unheralded revolution in representation is the subject of Peter Clark’s fascinating new book, The Men of 1924. Who were these men? Clark’s vivid portrayal is full of evocative portraits of a new breed of politician, the forerunners of all those who, later in the last century and this one, overcame a system from which they had been excluded for too long.

The common reputation of the British Labour Party has always been as 'a thing of the town', an essentially urban phenomenon which has failed to engage with the rural electorate or identify itself with rural issues. Yet during the inter-war years, Labour viewed the countryside as a crucial electoral battleground - even claiming that the party could never form a majority administration without winning a significant number of seats across rural Britain. Committing itself to a series ofcampaigns in rural areas during the 1920s and 30s, Labour developed a rural and often specifically agricultural programme on which to attract new support and members. Labour and the Countryside takes this forgotten chapter in the party's history as a starting point for a fascinating andwide-ranging re-examination of the relationship between the British Left and rural Britain.The first account of this aspect of Labour's history, this book draws on extensive research across a wide variety of original source material, from local party minutes and trade union archives to the records of Labour's first two periods in government. Historical, literary, and visual representations of the countryside are also examined, along with newspapers, magazines, and propaganda materials. In reconstructing the contexts within which Labour attempted to redefine itself as a voice for thecountryside, the resulting study presents a fresh perspective on the political history of the inter-war years.

A spirited reevaluation of the public moralists who shaped public policy in nineteenth-century America, Mugwumps: Public Moralists of the Gilded Age provides a refreshing look at a group of Americans whose importance to the history of our country has commonly been dismissed. A public interest group that labeled the generation following the American Civil War as the "Gilded Age," Mugwumps were college-educated individuals who lived the lessons of their moral philosophy--Christian values, republican virtue, and classical liberalism. Tracing Mugwump values back before the term was commonly used, Tucker defines these liberals as benevolent and altruistic, active campaigners against slavery and imperialism, and for sound money, lower tariffs, and civil service reform. The earliest Mugwumps took on the self- assigned task of advocating public principles over private interests. Evaluations of these public moralists during the 1950s and 1960s, however, did not paint the Mugwumps in so positive a light. Awash in the popular New Deal public policies that advocated positive government intervention and regulation in the economy, these studies dismissed Mugwump liberalism as outdated. More specifically, the reformers were criticized as being self-interested failures. Tucker obliges readers to look beyond such dismissals to the history and accomplishments of Mugwumps as a whole. Unlike previous historians, Tucker examines the antebellum roots of the Mugwumps and follows their ever-increasing participation in American government throughout the nineteenth century. Tucker portrays Mugwumps not as selfish agents of the middle class but as fascinating practitioners of eighteenth-century public virtue and nineteenth-century social science. This book forcefully challenges previous studies on the Mugwumps and restores these public moralists to the mainstream of nineteenth-century American history. Their concerns for morality and free-market economics are again fashionable in contemporary politics and deserving of fresh attention from both the general reader and the scholar.