Summary Of New Spirits By Rebecca Edwards

New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865-1905 written by Rebecca Edwards provides readers with many different individual accounts to illustrate the transformative time of America during the Gilded Age. The work shows the cultural, social, political and economical elements of the age that aided in forming the America we have today.
Edwards’s purpose in writing New Spirits is to offer readers new insights on the era by eliminating predetermined stereotypes one may have established before reading the work. Edwards wants readers to put aside their prior knowledge to understand just what it was like to live in the Gilded Age by providing readers with the consequences and achievements of people during the time. New Spirits makes an effort

Edwards voices the drastic growth in production and new inventions in the North, but points out the South’s struggle with keeping up with the drastic growth. It is clear Edwards wanted reader to fully understand that the South was struggling greatly after the war and because of it the North led the Industrial Revolution. Edwards focuses around the following question: What does the South do to reestablish itself and become economically stable again after facing an overwhelming loss agriculturally? Edwards use of evidence to back up her argument of the South’s struggles after the war and the lack of reconstruction make it a reliable statement. Her evidence includes groups such as Ku Klux Klan and the Republican corruption to be main evidence to why the South was behind the rest of the nation. Edwards argues that the Civil War brought political upheavals that led to new political parties to

Overall, Edwards presents a numerous amount of information and personal accounts that readers may not be able to find in other works. With all the great information Edwards shares, it seems she may have taken on too much. With such a big era, sometimes readers may find it difficult to processes the vast amount of information; Edwards can only cover a certain amount of information in the 256 pages of New Spirits. The work at times can be too compacted. There were times where Edwards could have omitted sections, especially in the first chapter because of the length in comparison to other chapters. Edwards did a remarkable job provided fluid information from start to finish and the work was interesting. One factual error or lack of information that can be noticed in the book revolves around education. Edwards claims “ By 1900, however, 80 percent of children between ages ten and fourteen-over 6.4 million-attended school.” The context of the quote does not pinpoint a specific population being described. Is Edwards discussing a specific state or is she talking about the United States as a whole? The lack of contextual information leaves readers questioning the accuracy of the statistic. Readers may also notice the lack of footnotes through out the work. Although Edwards is a very reputable scholar, a bigger library of footnotes would make New Spirits even more reputable.