This collection of documents on Populism and Progressivism serves as a hinge connecting the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The authors of its documents translated the late nineteenth century American experience with industrialization and urbanization into political ideas and reforms that influenced twentieth century American politics from Teddy Roosevelt’s New Nationalism, through Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, to John Kennedy’s New Frontier and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

The documents also display their authors’ understanding and sustained critique of the ideas and constitutional principles of the American Founding. Together, the documents display the thinking that sought, and largely succeeded in creating, a second American founding.