Populism and Industrialism: The Ideology of the Official Organ of the Nebraska Populist Movement

After nearly forty years, John D. Hicks\u27 The Populist Revolt remains the standard work on Populism. Despite the shortcomings of ignoring the international economic context and a tendency to accept at face value the Populists\u27 complaints, it is the best one volume of political history of the movement. In addition, it established the interpretive framework in which the subject has been viewed. This framework consists of two components, the agrarian and the retrogressive contexts. Populism was a political reform movement led by economically distressed farmers in the south and midwest, joined by the western silver states, that sprung from the peculiar social and economic conditions of those regions in the last two decades of the nineteenth century