Uses a wide variety of documents to show how Americans dealt with an age of extremes from 1887 to 1900, including rapid industrialization, unemployment, unprecedented wealth, and immigration.

What is a document? -- How to read a document -- Introduction -- Big business, industry, and the American dream -- Captains of industry ; Muckraking ; Survival of the fittest ; Responsibilities of the rich ; From rags to riches -- Immigration to a promised land -- Arrival ; Opportunity ; Sacrifices ; Racism ; Advice -- Sorrows of labor -- Knights of labor ; Haymarket Affair ; Trade unions ; Industrial unions ; Women in the work force ; Child labor ; Homestead Lockout -- Perils and promise of urban life -- Social activism ; Social Darwinism ; Ward bosses ; Prohibition -- Jacob Riis and the power of the photograph -- New South -- Sharecropper's contract ; Perfect democracy ; Cotton mill workers ; Rise of Jim Crow -- West -- Indian victory ; Whitening Indians ; Pioneers ; Exodusters ; Mexican Americans fight back -- Farmers' revolt -- Farmers' alliances ; Populist Party ; Election 1896 -- United States builds an empire -- Spanish-American War ; Anti-imperialism ; Philippines -- New women, strenuous men, and leisure -- Strenuous life ; Sports ; Rebellious women.