“Not only a unique contribution to Arkansas history but also, I think, a significant addition to what we know of protest movements nationally during the late nineteenth century.”—Carl H. Moneyhon, Professor of History, University of Arkansas–Little Rock; author of Arkansas and the New South, 1874–1929
"During the Gilded Age, the drama of farmer, labor, and populist politics unfolded with extraordinary force in the rural, impoverished, and racially fractured state of Arkansas. Matthew Hild brings to bear his superb skills as an historian to explore this drama in all of its at times brutal complexity. Anyone interested in the history of working class and farmer politics, and why they matter today, should read this book."—Charles Postel, author of The Populist Vision
"With Arkansas’s Gilded Age, Matthew Hild has given us the first modern account of the long farmer-labor movement in a too-long ignored state. Unlike, say, North Carolina to the east and Texas to the west, in Arkansas insurgent politics was often driven by organized labor, and the heyday of the movement took place in the 1880s rather than the 1890s. Hild’s account reminds us that no two states, even in the supposedly one-party South, were alike. A model of clear writing and thoughtful analysis, this book is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on working-class politics in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century South."—Gregg Cantrell, Professor of history at Texas Christian University