Read by Pete Larkin

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating. Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation, the American Prospect, Raritan, and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New York City. "Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."-Michael Kazin, Slate "Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison between, on the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the first Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political scene."-Kim Phillips-Fein, Atlantic "Sweeping and ambitious....Fraser weaves together a rich tapestry of history, statistics and barely suppressed outrage."-Maura Casey, Washington Post "Fascinating....As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics."-Naomi Klein, New York Times Book Review "Delivered with real verve....Like Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Thomas Piketty's Capital, butfrom an American perspective, Fraser writes majestically if not almost poetically about the making of capitalism."-Harvey J. Kaye, Daily Beast "Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender. His intention is not just to chronicle the change but to explain why it happened."-Jon Wiener, Los Angeles Times "A sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots."-Vanessa Bush, Booklist "Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. Highly recommended."- Library Journal "An absorbing, vigorous account of class politics....an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse."-Publishers Weekly "No one writing history today does it with the power, passion, insight, and rigor of Steve Fraser. In The Age of Acquiescence, Fraser reaches back a century to the first Gilded Age and then pushes forward into our own Gilded Age, providing his readers with a history that matters, that informs, and that, most critically, raises essential questions we should all be asking about wealth, power, and inequalities in America today."-David NASAw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy "Steve Fraser is that rare writer who combines a deep knowledge of history with a penetrating analysis of our current political and social condition. Here, in the lively prose that marks all his writing, he probes the similarities and differences between America's two gilded ages - the late nineteenth-century and today - offering provoc

Mode of access: World Wide Web