Profs and Pints Online presents: “Make America Gilded Again?” a look at America’s “Gilded Age” and how it compares to our current time, with Allen Pietrobon, assistant professor of Global Affairs at Trinity Washington University and former professorial lecturer of history at American University.

Crippling economic crisis. Fears related to immigration and disease. Income inequality. Corporate monopolies. Technological disruption. Corporate money unduly influencing politics.

Sound like 2020? Actually, here we’re talking about America from 1875 to 1900.

Known as “The Gilded Age,” it was a crucial era of industrialization, political turmoil, and social change that set the United States on the path to becoming the most economically powerful country in the world. Expansive new factories needed unskilled workers, who arrived via the largest wave of immigration in American history. New arrivals from Europe and Asia poured into rapidly expanding major cities, places many Americans saw as rife with corruption and infested with squalor—certainly not the “real” America. As mass immigration transformed the country, some Americans formed “progressive” community groups that sought to preserve American values by teaching immigrants not to cook their seemingly revolting ethnic foods like hamburgers and spaghetti.

With these changes came economic and social turbulence and dislocation. Many enterprising Americans took advantage of the “disruption” to succeed. Others were left behind, ill-equipped to compete in the new economy. The wealth gap between the rich and the poor was astronomical as industrial tycoons like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies built unthinkably large business empires and then used their monopoly power to hold down wages and shut down competition. They deployed their vast profits to buy politicians, corruptly tilting politics and the economy in their favor. Strikes and labor violence, protests and counter-protests bloodied the streets. All the while Americans grew increasingly divided and angry at their political leaders. One of their proposals: a ban on certain “dangerous” immigrant groups that the politicians tried to pin the blame on. Does the Gilded Age seem familiar yet?

Join award-winning professor Allen Pietrobon as he describes this tumultuous period and explores why this all sounds so familiar to us today. Among the questions he’ll answer: How did this period draw to a close? Might ours have a similar end?

Profs & Pints Online: Make America Gilded Again?