The 33 authors included in this volume reflect the many dramatic changes that transformed American culture between 1830 and 1900. These years begin with the populist democratic fervor that surrounded the 1828 election of Andrew Jackson and conclude with the period of Gilded Age prosperity that followed the cataclysmic upheaval that was the Civil War. During these same years, the United States expanded its western territories from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, absorbed waves of European immigration, waged wars with Mexico and the indigenous peoples of North America, eradicated slavery, completed the transcontinental railroad, and witnessed the rise of the women’s rights movement. America’s literature quite understandably engages with the full range of these changes, chronicling the multitude of responses that registered in the conduct and national consciousness of the citizenry