This revisionist view of late-nineteenth-century history credits Main Street, not Wall Street, with laying the foundations of modern America In American history, the prevailing narratives of the tumultuous late-nineteenth century focus on wealthy individuals and tycoons while downplaying the very high social and economic stresses they caused. The Age of Discontent reveals that it was not the tycoons, but rather the laborers and farmers, who in a great uprising of popular democracy reinvented the nation for the emerging industrial world never imagined by the Founders. Facing conditions far worse than previously documented, they overcame the frayed social safety net and violent opposition to pull off what the labor leader John Mitchell has described as the "Second Emancipation," which addressed a dangerously tilted playing field with government programs and legislation. Based on meticulous primary source research and integrating music, photographs, artworks, and statistical data, this sweeping history places grassroots activists and reformers―many recognized for the first time―at center stage in a fascinating success story of perseverance and commitment. "A fascinating synthesis of labor and economic history in the late-nineteenth-century United States, The Age of Discontent argues for the importance of overlooked laws and policy changes that successfully reined in the worst excesses of laissez-faire industrial capitalism before the turn of the century. In a book brimming with the stories and experiences of real people, along with groundbreaking insights about the plight of workers during the period, Brauer argues persuasively that ordinary Americans rewrote the rules of their society and gave birth to our modern democracy."―Jeremy Young, Freedom to Learn program director, PEN America "Today, we need this book. Brauer's Age of Discontent is the flipside of the Gilded Age, a portrait of those farmers, factory hands, washerwomen, migrants, and land-grant college intellectuals―the men and women who reinvented democracy for the modern world. It's a people's epic written by a brilliant historian"―Joseph Kelly, director of Irish and Irish American studies, College of Charleston, and author, Marooned: Jamestown, Shipwreck, and a New History of America's Origin Ralph Brauer taught American studies at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and he is the author of The Strange Death of Liberal America (2006). He received a PhD in American studies from the University of Minnesota.