Dr. Jackson Lears Compares the Gilded Age of the Late 1880s to the Period From 1980 to 2010 at the Historical Society Lecture June 10
For some years, historians have called the period between the late 1980s and the 2010s a second Gilded Age, sharing many similarities with the 1880s through the 1910s. Both eras were characterized by unregulated economic expansion, flagrant corruption on Wall Street, growing class divisions, the concentration of wealth within a conspicuously consuming elite and a series of imperial adventures (or misadventures) abroad.
Dr. Jackson Lears will examine the parallels and differences between the two eras to explain why the growth of inequality 100 years ago provoked widespread demands for reform among the populace (and even the well-to-do) while contemporary comment on the situation is largely absent.
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Lears was educated at the University of Virginia, the University of North Carolina and Yale University, where he received a Ph.D. in American studies in 1979. He has taught at Yale University, the University of Missouri and New York University, and is now Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University and Editor in Chief of the quarterly review Raritan. He is the author of No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981) and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for History in 1995.
Q&A will follow the lecture and refreshments will be served.
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Tuesday, June 10, 2014; 7:00 to 8:00 pm
The Storehouse Gallery will open at 6:00 pm to allow pre-lecture viewing of the exhibition Enjoying the Country Life: Greenwich Great Estates.
Book sale and signing from 8:00 to 8:30 pm
Greenwich Historical Society, Vanderbilt Education Center, 39 Strickland Road, Cos Cob, CT 06807.
Members: $10; nonmembers: $15
To register, visit www.greenwichhistory.org or call 203-869-6899, Ext 10.
