Ever-increasing economic inequality, speedy technological change, the creation of dominant corporations controlled by a small business elite, political corruption, and the rise of populism and nativism. These are all features of American life in 2025. However our nation has additionally seen this film play earlier than, most notably again within the Gilded Age, which ran from the 1870s by means of the late Eighteen Nineties. Above, we have now a free two-hour documalestary on the Gilded Age created by PBS. They write:
Within the closing many years of the 9teenth century, during what has grow to be often called the Gilded Age, the population of the United States doubled within the span of a single generation. The nation turned the world’s leading professionalducer of meals, coal, oil, and metal, enticeed huge quantities of foreign make investmentsment, and pushed into markets in Europe and the Far East. As national wealth increaseed, two classes rose simultaneously, separated by a gulf of experience and circumstance that was unprecedented in American life. These disparities sparked passionate and violent debate over questions nonetheless being requested in our personal occasions: How is wealth finest distributed, and by what course of? Does government exist to professionaltect private property or professionalvide balm to the inevitable casualties of a churning industrial system? Ought to the government concern itself mainly with economic progress or economic justice? The battles over these questions have been fought in Congress, the courts, the polling place, the workplace and the streets. The outcome of those disputes was each uncertain and momentous, and marked by a passionate vitriol and level of violence that might shock the conscience of many Americans immediately. The Gilded Age presents a compelling and complex story of some of the convulsive and transformative eras in American history.
To a certain diploma, this documalestary will provide help to make guesster sense of our personal fraught occasions and perhaps really feel extra optimistic about the place we’d find yourself. (It’s price maintaining in thoughts that the disruptions of the Gilded Age eventually gave strategy to the reforms of the Professionalgressive Period.) What’s extra, if you happen to’re watching the excellent HBO sequence, The Gilded Age, the movie professionalvides historical againfloor that can directly add to your appreciation of the present. You possibly can watch the movie on-line above, or discover it in our collection of Free Documalestaries, a subset of our collection 4,000+ Free Motion pictures On-line: Nice Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documalestaries & Extra.
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