
The Age of Acrimony
How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915
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Narrated by:
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Johnny Heller
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By:
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Jon Grinspan
A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics.
Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century’s end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans’ voting rates crashed and never fully recovered.
This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today.
The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America’s unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation’s politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system’s enduring capacity to reinvent itself.©2021 Jon Grinspan (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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Political Insights
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Makes present politics so much more understandable.
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You Will Learn A Lot from this book
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Presenting the history of the era through the story of the Kelley family made it both more enjoyable and memorable.
Puts our current political era in perspective
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Great Context for Our Current Period of Democracy
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I just don't know whether to feel more optimisti or less, about our future as a democracy!
Fascinating revelations
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Learned a lot
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I kept waiting for more meat on the history part, but it's mostly flowery writing about human interest stories than an analysis of the events / forces, and why they're happening.
To me it was more a Read of Acrimony, but if you want the story of some of the central characters, then it's in there. I think?
Needs more history, less anecdotes
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The book sometimes read like a biography of Will "Pig Iron" Kelley and his daughter Florence. Prehaps a deliberate choice to anchor the reader on a couple key individuals as to not get lost in all the dirty, rotten characters that plagued the Gilded Age era. I would have liked more focus on the tools that political parties leveraged to influence the public, corporations, and ultimately elections. Additionally, I hoped that Part 3 would have spent more time describing the mechanisms that pulled power out of politics and how those lessons might be applied today.
The narrator spoke too quickly for me. I had to slow it down and make frequent backtracks to hear what was happening in places. It took a few chapter for me to grasp all that was going on and then I was fully in by Part 2. His speaking style and tone was just enough of that "mid-atlantic" sound that felt fitting for the piece.
Fascinating story but spoken too quickly
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