We lost not one but two great historians on May 19, 2014. In addition to Vincent Harding, whom Robert elegantly memorialized, that day also saw the death of Gabriel Kolko, whose 1963 book The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 stands as a classic of American historiography (as Andy made clear). The Triumph of Conservatism is one of the best historical accounts of what Martin Sklar and others called “corporate liberalism,” but what Kolko preferred to call, following Max Weber, “political capitalism.” Kolko showed that conventional understandings of the Progressive Era were exactly wrong. Business and the Read more