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Age of the Machine: The Fight to Reinvent Democracy in the Gilded Age

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The Breakers 44 Ochre Point Ave
Newport, RI 02840
May 18, 2023 6:00pm – 7:00pm
  • Virtual attendance is available, you will receive your zoom link 24 hours in advance
  • Please arrive at The Breakers in time to be seated for the Lecture
  • Advance registration required.
  • $20 In-person attendance
  • $15 In-person attendance, members
  • $10 Zoom (members and non-members)

The Gilded Age is notorious as a time of rampant political corruption and heavy-handed corporate intervention in elections. It was also a time when reformers ignited a reinvention of American democracy, changing how people voted, why people voted and how government worked. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer T.J. Stiles looks at the often-surprising battles of Theodore Roosevelt and others, revealing both the underside of their efforts and the unexpected benefits as they laid the foundations for the republic we know today.

Event thumbnail photo credit: “Theodore Roosevelt,” American Press Association, c. 1910. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division.

T.J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning American biographer

T.J. Stiles received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History for “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America” and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction for “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.” He is also the author of “Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War,” which won the Ambassador Book Award and Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship. He is currently writing a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

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