Rosanne Currarino studies the economic, intellectual, and cultural history of nineteenth-century America. Her first book The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age (Working Class in American History Series, University of Illinois Press, 2011) examines diverse efforts to redefine the parameters of democratic participation in industrial America. Her new book, Standard Orange: The Business of Incorporation in Gilded Age California (forthcoming 2027, University of Chicago Press) looks at Southern California’s early orange growers – the businessmen who eventually formed Sunkist – in order to reconsider how we understand the incorporation of America during the Gilded Age. This project was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/Huntington Library. From 2020 until 2024 she was co-editor then editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. With Robert Johnston (University of Illinois-Chicago) she is co-editor of The [Oxford] Handbook of the Progressive Era. Her new project, The Age of Abundance: The Politics of Plenty in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, turns to the varied responses - positive, negative, and decidedly mixed - to the "new surplus" of the industrial United States.
The Labor Question in America: Economic Democracy in the Gilded Age
Articles
- “A Democracy of Good Dinners: E. R. A. Seligman and the Democratic Consumption of Luxury,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 25 (Apr. 2026): 205–10
- “How Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Have Engaged with Richard Bensel’s Political Economy of American Industrialization,” Reviews in American History 53 (Dec. 2025): 404–11
- “Our Gilded Age,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 19 (April 2020): 321-336
- “Transition Questions,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (July 2016): 263-277
- “Towards a History of Cultural Economy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (December 2012): 564-585
- “‘The Revolution Now In Progress’: Social Economics and the Labor Question,” Labor History 50 (February 2009): 1-17
- “The Politics of ‘More’: The Labor Question and the Idea of Economic Liberty in Industrial America,” Journal of American History 93 (June 2006): 17-36
- “Meat vs. Rice: Working-Class Manhood and Anti-Chinese Hysteria,” Men and Masculinities 9 (April 2007): 476-490
- “‘To Taste of Life's Sweets’: The Eight-Hour Movement and the Origins of Modern Liberalism,” Labor's Heritage 12 (Spring/Summer 2004): 22-33
