After decades of conservative dominance, the election of Barack Obama may signal the beginning of a new progressive era. But what exactly is progressivism? What role has it played in the political, social, and economic history of America?
This very timely Very Short Introduction offers an engaging overview of progressivism in America--its origins, guiding principles, major leaders and major accomplishments. A many-sided reform movement that lasted from the late 1890s until the early 1920s, progressivism emerged as a response to the excesses of the Gilded Age, an era that plunged working Americans into poverty while a new class of ostentatious millionaires built huge mansions and flaunted their wealth. As capitalism ran unchecked and more and more economic power was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, a sense of social crisis was pervasive. Progressive national leaders like William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Woodrow Wilson, as well as muckraking journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and social workers like Jane Addams and Lillian Wald answered the growing call for change. They fought for worker's compensation, child labor laws, minimum wage and maximum hours legislation; they enacted anti-trust laws, improved living conditions in urban slums, instituted the graduated income tax, won women the right to vote, and laid the groundwork for Roosevelt's New Deal. Nugent shows that the progressives--with the glaring exception of race relations--shared a common conviction that society should be fair to all its members and that governments had a responsibility to see that fairness prevailed.
Offering a succinct history of the broad reform movement that upset a stagnant conservative orthodoxy, this Very Short Introduction reveals many parallels, even lessons, highly appropriate to our own time.
About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

This 40th Anniversary Retrospective presents the reminiscences of the directors of Indiana University's Office of Overseas Study, from its creation in 1972 until the present day. They recount not only how IU faculty and administrators selected partners and locations around the world but also how they established systems at the university to facilitate student access and participation. Integrating such programs into a large public institution of eight campuses posed challenges as well as opportunities. While study abroad today is considered a high impact educational activity that students expect from a college experience, the eight authors show how unique such opportunities were just a few decades ago. Faculty and administrators who are tasked today with designing education abroad programs for students will appreciate and learn from this comprehensive overview of administrative and academic know-how. And those who had similar experiences during the past few decades will commiserate with the trials and tribulations inherent to internationalizing an institution of higher education.

Acclaimed historian Walter Nugent brings us what is perhaps the most comprehensive and fascinating account to date of the peopling of the American West. In this epic social-demographic history, Nugent explores the populations of the West as they grow, change and intersect from the Paleo-Indians, the Spanish Conquistadors, to displaced Okies, wartime African American immigrants, and all the disparate groups that have made California the most ethnically diverse state in the union.

Their tale, in all its complexity, is a tale that surprises, that subverts traditional stereotypes and that illuminates the multifaceted character of one of the world’s most unique and dynamic territories.

A political movement rallies against under regulated banks, widening gaps in wealth, and gridlocked governments. Sound familiar? More than a century before Occupy Wall Street, the People's Party of the 1890s was organizing for change. They were the original source of the term "populism," and a catalyst for the later Progressive Era and New Deal. Historians wrote approvingly of the Populists up into the 1950s. But with time and new voices, led by historian Richard Hofstadter, the Populists were denigrated, depicted as demagogic, conspiratorial, and even anti-Semitic. In a landmark study, Walter Nugent set out to uncover the truth of populism, focusing on the most prominent Populist state, Kansas. He focused on primary sources, looking at the small towns and farmers that were the foundation of the movement. The result, The Tolerant Populists, was the first book-length, source-based analysis of the Populists. Nugent's work sparked a movement to undo the historical revisionism and ultimately found itself at the center of a controversy that has been called "one of the bloodiest episodes in American historiography." This timely rerelease of The Tolerant Populists comes as the term finds new currency - and new scorn - in modern politics. A definitive work on populism, it serves as a vivid example of the potential that political movements and popular opinion can have to change history and affect our future.

"Nugent's study, well illustrated and documented... will become amust for courses on migration history." -- Dirk Hoerder, InternationalMigration Review

"A brilliant analysis of a critical chapterof migration history." -- Ira Glazier, American HistoricalReview

"Nugent's work is the ideal -- the only -- narrativecompanion to any quantitative analysis of late-nineteenth century populationmovements in the Atlantic economy." -- Journal of EconomicHistory

"In terms of synthesizing existing literature andextending comparisons across boundaries, Nugent offers a shining example for bothstudents and established scholars." -- Journal of InterdisciplinaryHistory

"Those who appreciate the impact of history will be impressed with theselection of articles." -- Nebraska History

Designed for surveycourses -- yet in-depth enough to support intensive discussion -- these seventeenclassic essays traverse the history of the American West, from women's propertyrights in Spanish-Mexican California to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, fromhomesteading and mining to the Great Depression and World War II. Provocative andilluminating.