An account of the United States in the 1890s, what the author calls the Reckless Decade and what historians have named the Gilded Age. In his prologue, Brand writes
During the 1890s, Americans agonized over what the twentieth century about to begin held for their country. To many of them, America’s finest hours were behind it. The continent was filing up and the vast open spaces that had characterized American life were quickly disappearing. The symbolism of the vanishing frontier was even more traumatic than the reality. A “frontier” interpretation of American history, pioneered and popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner, attained the status of revealed truth during the 1890s. According to this view, American democracy, self-reliance, and prosperity–in short, the distinctive traits that made Americans what they were–depended on the ready availability of free land. With the disappearance of this free land, an epoch of American history was ending.
He could have been writing about the 2020s. Informative and inclusive, from Carnegie and Rockefeller to the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo to Booker T. Washington, Brand tells his tale with dry wit and one eye always on the future, drawing many parallels between then and now. All of this has happened before, yes, even, as Paul Krugman calls them, Muskaswamy. An oddly comforting read.