09/25/2026
Join us for a History Camp Boston 2026 session with Steve Parode discussing "The United States Navy in the American Gilded Age (1878-1898): From Rotting Relic to Herald of Empire"
About the session:
Lately, much has been made of the American “Gilded Age.”
Without doubt, it was a time of impressive personal wealth generation, technological and industrial experimentation, and sweeping social change.
Most standards of society, and national power, experienced an unprecedented rate of evolution, and the American military was generally not immune to rapid shifts in technical and tactical capability and priority.
Dependent as it was upon technological innovation, in fewer than twenty years the United States Navy transformed itself from a coastal defense force of laughable global concern to a far-ranging maritime force able to impose American political will on maritime empires that had sustained European influence around the world for four centuries.
This presentation intends to clearly illuminate the specific character of Gilded Age politics and technology that re-engineered the United States Navy from a bygone relic of the American Civil War into the first herald of the American empire without which the modern character and form of our nation would be unrecognizable today.
