A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.
Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Prize for the best book in labour history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, The Nation, The American Prospect, Raritan, and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New York City.
"A cutting study of how American workers lost the will to battle
for their well-being. It took decades to get ourselves into this
mess. It's going to take decades to get out of it. Fraser makes
that all too clear in a book that deserves to spark a national
conversation." --Michael Causey, Washington Independent Review of
Books
"A sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and
the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots."--Vanessa
Bush, Booklist
"A splendid and illuminating book. Fraser's writing is clear-headed
and free of cant. I know of no better an accounting for the
division of America over the last forty years into a minority of
the terrified rich and a majority of the humiliated poor."--Lewis
Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly and author of Pretensions to
Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration
"An absorbing, vigorous account of class politics....an excellent,
very readable recreation of an authentically American form of
working-class militancy and its eclipse."--Publishers Weekly
"Delivered with real verve....Like Marx in the Communist Manifesto
and Thomas Piketty's Capital, butfrom an American perspective,
Fraser writes majestically if not almost poetically about the
making of capitalism."--Harvey J. Kaye, Daily Beast
"Fascinating....As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded
Age American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing
statistics."--Naomi Klein, New York Times Book Review (Editor's
Choice)
"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis
of our present state of submission and surrender. His intention is
not just to chronicle the change but to explain why it
happened."--Jon Wiener, Los Angeles Times
"Fraser leads the reader on a fascinating and relevant journey."
--Brian Tanguay, Santa Barbara Independent
"Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison between, on
the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the first
Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political
scene."--Kim Phillips-Fein, Atlantic
"Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of
America's growing wealth disparity. Highly recommended."-- Library
Journal
"No one writing history today does it with the power, passion,
insight, and rigor of Steve Fraser. In The Age of Acquiescence,
Fraser reaches back a century to the first Gilded Age and then
pushes forward into our own Gilded Age, providing his readers with
a history that matters, that informs, and that, most critically,
raises essential questions we should all be asking about wealth,
power, and inequalities in America today."--David Nasaw, author of
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P.
Kennedy
"Over the last few years, there's been a wealth of books describing
our new Gilded Age and bemoaning the extreme economic inequality
that now defines modern America. Steve Fraser's fascinating The Age
of Acquiescence is indispensable because it explains how that
happened, how America's long standing opposition to concentrated
wealth was defeated. Steve Fraser, in other words, is Thomas
Piketty with politics, providing a crucial guide in helping the
ninety-nine percent understand the terms of their defeat and, more
importantly, how it can once again go on the offensive."--Greg
Grandin, author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and
Deception in the New World and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of
Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City
"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current
zeitgeist."--Michael Kazin, Slate
"Steve Fraser has given us a sweeping account of the economic and
cultural changes in American society that combined to create an
earlier era of working class struggle and hope, and then in our
present moment have generated quiescence and despair. Read this
book for its synoptic account of the ways that cultural
manipulation have accompanied intensifying economic exploitation.
But read it also to snatch glimmers of a better future from the
past."--Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How
Ordinary People Change America
"Steve Fraser is that rare writer who combines a deep knowledge of
history with a penetrating analysis of our current political and
social condition. Here, in the lively prose that marks all his
writing, he probes the similarities and differences between
America's two gilded ages - the late nineteenth-century and today -
offering provocative observations about why the first produced
massive popular resistance and the second resigned
acquiescence."--Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of
The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery
"Sweeping and ambitious....Fraser weaves together a rich tapestry
of history, statistics and barely suppressed outrage."--Maura
Casey, Washington Post
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