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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
I would like to thank Rebecca Edwards and James L. Huston for their thoughtful and challenging responses to my essay. Both these authors have thought deeply about periodization and synthesis, and for that reason it occurred to me to allow their responses to stand alone and go unanswered. But in the interests of sparking further discussion I would like to offer a few clarifications and additional thoughts with regard to periodization. Due to considerations of space I will not try to answer all the reservations and criticisms expressed and alternative views advanced but will focus only on a few points that bear on the thrust of my essay.
1 To take one outstanding example, Bensel's thought-provoking periodization ends up slighting socio-economic complexity in favor of an analysis grounded in the behavior of political parties and the nation-state. A reader of his work gets the impression that the state and politics were the prime movers of society and classes. Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Economy of American Industrialisation, 1877-1900 (Cambridge, UK, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar.
2 Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982).Google Scholar
