The Year of the Century: 1876 was published by Scribner in 1966. The book uses the single year of America’s centennial as a lens through which to examine the entire condition of the nation — its achievements, contradictions, corruptions, and unresolved conflicts.
The year 1876 was extraordinarily eventful: the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition displayed American technological and industrial progress to the world; Custer’s Seventh Cavalry was annihilated at Little Big Horn; the presidential election between Hayes and Tilden produced one of the most corrupt bargains in American political history; Reconstruction was effectively ended, abandoning four million formerly enslaved people to the mercies of their former masters; the transcontinental railroad was transforming commerce and settlement; and the labor movement was gathering force in response to industrial exploitation.
Brown weaves these threads into a single narrative that reveals how profoundly conflicted the United States was at the moment it celebrated its hundredth birthday. The Exposition proclaimed democracy, progress, and equality; the reality included ongoing genocide of Native peoples, the reimposition of racial tyranny in the South, political corruption at every level, and the emergence of industrial monopolies that concentrated wealth in unprecedented ways.
The book demonstrates Brown’s range as a historian — this is neither primarily a Native American history nor a military history but a broad social portrait that encompasses politics, technology, culture, and daily life. It also anticipates the style of popular narrative history that would later be practiced by writers like Erik Larson.
Collecting The Year of the Century: 1876
First edition (Scribner, New York, 1966): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good/very good: $10–$25