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An announcement that the Gilded-Age economy is on the agenda produces pained looks around the classroom. These signs of distress signal that the economic history of the late nineteenth century needs special handling. The first step in this task is to recognize the obstacles in teaching the subject. The chief impediments are the inherent complexities of economics, negative stereotypes about the Gilded Age, and the dual paths of economic change during the period. No single strategy can cut a smooth course through these brambles, but acknowledging their existence helps to avoid becoming entangled in them.
Economics frightens many students. Some aspects of the subject are difficult, it is true, but our contemporary culture adds to these complications. Today's teenagers grow up in an affluent society. Most college students and a large proportion of high school students come from middle-class backgrounds, where abundance, not scarcity, is their chief economic reference. The vast majority of young Americans do not earn their own living. Few know anything about budgets or accounting; still fewer have experienced the fear of bankruptcy. It's not that kids today are out of touch. They just have little personal basis for understanding the economic realities that faced adults in the Gilded Age.
My strategy for coping with these challenges begins with posing some simple questions. I start by asking how people earned a living in the period. Answers to this inquiry not only describe the contours of the workforce, but also prompt questions about the goods that workers produced. One can follow up the answers by discussing how these items were made. I encourage students to draw on their own experiences and use their imagination in these exercises. A question such as "how did a person get a pair of shoes before malls existed?" can get the ball rolling.
Profiling the workforce leads to questions about how much workers were paid and how they spent their earnings. At this point I introduce the concepts of standard of living and the distribution of wealth. Students tend to dichotomize Gilded-Age society into a few fabulously wealthy industrialists and a mass of impoverished workers-a distorted image probably due in part to the period's nickname. While students have a general sense that the United States is today among...