Jane Addams as Reformer (Lectures in American History Series)

Jane Addams as Reformer: Striving For the Lincoln Ideal in a Rapidly Changing America

Had Abraham Lincoln lived another 15 or 20 years beyond his death in 1865, he would have witnessed
enormous challenges to his vision of a partnership of business and labor against the evils of slavery and
xenophobia. Instead, by the 1880s, business and labor were increasingly in opposition to each other, and Jim
Crow racism and anti-immigrant bigotry was on the rise as the United States rapidly industrialized and
urbanized. Jane Addams grew up idolizing President Lincoln, but discovered she needed to adapt her ideals
and strategies to meet the reform needs of a new and complex society far removed from the stark but simpler
issues of a much more rural antebellum (pre-Civil War) America.

Presented by Andy Dvorak