Age of Reform

The book The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter describes the last quarter of the nineteenth century known as the Gilded Age and Progressive eras, which exerted strong influence on American politics until the onset of World War I. It introduced Hofstadter¡¯s own ideas about the politics, which was that the people act less from pure economic self-interest than from a desire to preserve their social standing. He also showed the agrarian myth, and the dark side of the Populists in the late nineteenth-century, by described how they were scared of modernization, and longing for the agrarian past.
Richard Hofstadter was one of the greatest scholars of American History. He was famous for writing history books about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Richard was a professor in Columbia University, at the age of 27, which was in 1943, he began writing his books, including The American Political Tradition, Social Darwinism in American Thought, and The Age of Reform, which was his ...