Dudley, Harold Merriman. "The Populist Movement." Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1928. 

Ellis, Richard J. "Rival Visions of Equality in American Political Culture." Review of Politics 1992 54(2): 253-280.  American definitions of equality have ranged from equality of opportunity to equality of condition.  Government was viewed as an obstacle to equality through the 19th century, the perception of its ability to enhance equality characterized Populism, Progressivism, and the New Deal.  America: History and Life, 30:11525  

Emerick, C.F. "An Analysis of Agricultural Discontent in the United States." Political Science Quarterly. Part 1, 1(3):433-63. September 1896. Part 2, 11(4):601-39. December 1896. Part 3, 12(1):93-127. March 1897.   

Fine, Nathan. Labor and Farmer Parties in the United States, 1828-1928. 445 p. New York: Rand School of Social Sciences. 1928. 

Farmer, Hallie, Part I. "The Economic Background of Frontier Populism." Part II. "The Railroads and Frontier Populism." Ph.D. Dissertation (Political Science), University of Wisconsin - Madison, 1927. 

Fine, Sidney. Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State, A Study of Conflict in American Thought, 1865‑1901. 468 p. U of Michigan Publications, History and Political Science, 22. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1956.  

Fite, Gilbert C. "The Agrarian Tradition and its Meaning for Today." Minnesota History. 40(6):293‑99, notes. Summer 1967.  On the history and continued strength of the agrarian tradition.   

_____. The Farmer's Frontier, 1865‑1900. 272 p. New York: Holt, 1966.  Scholarly and important, especially on causes for rural discontent.  

Fite, Gilbert C. "Republican Strategy and the Farm Vote in the Presidential Campaign of 1896." American Historical Review 1960 65(4): 787-806.  "Republicans argued vigorously that free silver would not help farmers because it did not address the real problem, surplus output and lack of demand.  They argued that a higher protective tariff for manufacturers would create more demand, which would increase demand for agricultural products. 

Folsom, Burton W., II. "The Collective Biography as a Research Tool." Mid-America. 54(2):108-22. 1972.  Ethnicity, occupation and age are among significant variables recently applied to Populist characteristics. 

Freie, John F. "Minor Parties in Realigning Eras." American Politics Quarterly 1982 10(1): 47-63.  Establishes an association between the strength of the minor party and the sharpness of the realignment.  The strength of the Populist Party in 1892 and the Progressive Party in 1924 were strongly associated with the sharpness of the realignment process.  

Goebel, Thomas. "The Political Economy of American Populism from Jackson to the New Deal." Studies in American Political Development 1997 11(1): 109-148. The movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries based on the political economic model of populist republicanism took numerous incarnations, yet shared a common ideology that political favoritism and abuse of political power caused wealth and economic power to rest in the hands of a few businesses - creating an inequality of wealth that eroded American democracy. These movements (Jacksonian democracy, Greenback Party, Grangers, Populists, and Progressives) produced a distinctive ideology and language of protest that crossed class and party lines to champion the absolute sovereignty and wisdom of the people. By the 1930's, changing economic conditions and New Deal legislation aimed at dismantling the monopolies and trusts they fought made populist movements largely irrelevant.  America: History and Life, 35:5077

Goldman, Eric. Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform. 372 p.  New York: Knopf, 1952.  See pp. 24-65.  

Goldman, Eric F. "Just Plain Folks." American Heritage 1972 23(4): 4-8, 90-91.  A short history of the influence of Populism and the political campaigns in which it figured. 

Goodwyn, Lawrence C. Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America. New York, Oxford U P, 1976.  Abridged as The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America. 349 p. Derived from Goodwyn's Ph.D. dissertation, "The Origin and Development of American Populism. 510 p. Ph.D. dissertation, U of Texas at Austin, 1971. Dissertation Abstracts, 33:3538‑A.  The Alliance's unsuccessful experiments in cooperative buying and selling produced a mass-based "movement culture" that turned to politics in order to obtain government cooperatives with the subtreasury plan.  The subtreasury plan, not the free silver issue, thus, was the essence of Populism. 

Granjon, Marie-Christine. "Contestation et Democratie Dans l'Amerique de 20e Siecle." Transl/Info: [Conflict and Democracy in 20th-century America]. Vingtième Siècle [France] 1988 (18): 43-54.  The distance between the American dream and the reality of social inequalities has fed political and social protest in the United States since the 19th century in the form of populism, Progressivism, socialism, and radicalism.   

Grantham, Dewey W., Jr. "Southern Congressional Leaders and the New Freedom, 1913-1917." Journal of Southern History. 13(4):439-59. November 1947.  Some former Populists, now Democrats, during the first Democratic controlled US House since the Civil War. 1913.  

Greer, Thomas H. American Social Reform Movements: Their Pattern Since 1865. 313 p. New York: Prentice, 1949.  Chapter 3, pp. 61-91, "Farmers in Revolt."  

Hadwiger, Don F. "Farmers in Politics." Agricultural History. 50(1): 156-70. 1976.  Also see Lowell K. Dyson's comments, pp. 170-74. 

Hicks, John D. The Populist Revolt: A History of the Farmers' Alliance and the People's Party.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1931; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961.  The Progressive historian's magnum opus on Populism.  Hicks emphasized economic pragmatism over ideals, presenting Populism as interest group politics, with have‑nots demanding their fair share of the nation's bounty.  He argued that financial manipulations, deflation, high interest rates, mortgage foreclosures, unfair railroad practices, and a high protective tariff unjustly impoverished farmers.  Corruption accounted for such outrages and Populists presented popular control of government as the solution. 

Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR. 328 p. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1955.  The most significant revisionist work on Populism.  See "The folklore of Populism," pp. 60‑93.  Hofstadter discounted third party links to other reform movements and argued that Populists were nostalgic, backward‑looking petty capitalists.  They were provincial, conspiracy-minded, and had a tendency toward scapegoatism that manifested itself as nativism, anti-semitism, anti-intellectualism, and Anglophobia. 

_____. "Parrington and the Jeffersonian Tradition," Journal of the History of Ideas. 2, no. 4 (October, 1941): 391-400.  Agrarian opposition to industrial capitalism was "theoretically impotent." 

Kazin, Michael. The Populist Persuasion: An American History. Basic Books, 1995. Populists and allegedly Populistic movements since the 1890s. 

Kleppner, Paul. Continuity and Change in Electoral Politics, 1893-1928. 288 p. Contributions in American History No. 120. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1986.  

Koch, William E. "Campaign and Protest Singing During the Populist Era." Journal of the West 1983 22(3): 47-57.  Singing added drama and emotional appeal to political gatherings staged by such groups as the Grangers, the Farmers' Alliance, and the Populist Party. Samples of campaign and protest songs. 

Kramer, Dale. The Wild Jackasses: The American Farmer in Revolt. 260 p. New York: Hastings, 1956.  A popular account of the Grange, Populists, Nonpartisan League, and Farmers' Union. 1867-1933.  

Kuropiatnik, G.P. Fermerskoe dvizhenie v SShA: Ot Greindzherovk Narodnoi partii, 1867-1896 (The Farmers' Movement in the USA: From the Granges to the Populists, 1867-1896). 438 p.  Moscow: Izdatel'stvo "Nauka," 1971. Russian. 

Láng, Imre. "Tarsadalompolitikai Wszmék és Mozgalmak Az Egyesült Allamokban a 19. Szazad Masodik Felétol 1917-IG" [Social Policy Concepts and Movements in the United States from the Second Half of the 19th Century to 1917]. Világtörténet [Hungary] 1994 (Fall-Wint): 3-23.  Before 1850 or so, the small farmer living under very difficult conditions was the backbone of America.  Agrarian dissatisfaction emerged with industrialization, leading to the Populist movement. 

Lasch, Christopher. The Agony of the American Left. New York: Knopf, 1969. See "The Decline of Populism." pp. 3-31.

Lerda, Valeria Gennaro. Il Populismo Americano: Movimenti Radicali di Protesta Agraria nella Seconda Meta' dell'800. [American populism: radical movement of agrarian protest in the second half of the 1800s]. Genoa: Mondini & Siccardi, 1981. 665 pp. (Italian) 

Lustig, R. Jeffrey. Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1890-1920. 357 p. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982.  

McMath, Robert C., Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877-1898. New York: Hill and Wang, 1993. 245 pp. McMath's connects the story of the Populist revolt to the social history of late nineteenth century rural America.  Populists were not isolated, ignorant hicks unable to cope with the modern world.  Those who joined the movement were deeply rooted in the social and economic networks that pervaded the rural communities of late nineteenth century America.  McMath notes certain similarities between conditions in the late nineteenth century South and West.  Populism was strongest where railroads had been completed after 1877.  Railroads brought both new commercial relationships and exposed farmers to a labor radicalism that kept alive old cooperative labor practices.  It was grounded in the thought of the Founding Fathers, which farmers easily modified for their own purposes.  Unlike Goodwyn, who argues Populism was something new, McMath reveals a pre-existing culture of protest had already exhibited itself in the form of the Granger movement and Greenback party before the vast expansion of the Farmers Alliances in the 1880s.  The 1892 Populist campaign destroyed the Alliance organization, which signaled a dangerous erosion of the social movement that undergirded the party, eventually leading to its demise.   

Miller, Worth Robert. "Farmers and Third-Party Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century America." In The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America. pp. 235-60. Edited by Charles W. Calhoun. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc., 1996. Populists were ideologically committed to the republicanism of earlier generations, which they applied to current development like the widening gap between rich and poor.  Populism was the last stand of freeholders and independent workers before being proletarianized.  They accepted industrialization, but demanded that it be made humane.   
Reprint: http://clio.missouristate.edu/wrmiller.

_____. "The Lost World of Gilded Age Politics." Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive
            Era. 1, no. 1 (January 2002): 49-67. Only a brief treatment of Populism. Reprint:
            http://Clio.MissouriState.edu/wrmiller/

_____. Populism and the People's Party During the Gilded Age. Alexandria, VA: Alexander
            Street Press, 2006. Online document project that includes an Introductory Essay, Primary
            Source Documents, and Annotative Headnotes. http://alexanderstreet.com/products/gild.htm

_____. Populist Cartoons: An Illustrated History of the Populist Movement in the 1890s. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2011.  198 pp.  This book tells the story of the Populist Revolt through 150 cartoons taken from Populist newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s, with an accompanying narrative.

_____. "The Populist Vision: A Roundtable Discussion." Kansas History. 32, no. 1 (Spring 2009):
            18-45.  Commentary on Charles Postel, The Populist Vision, which won the 2008 Bancroft
            and Frederick Jackson Turner Prizes in History, by Gregg Cantrell, Rebecca Edwards,
            Robert C. McMath, Jr., Worth Robert Miller, and William C. Pratt.  Introduction by
            Worth Robert Miller and reply by Charles Postel.

Mochizuki, Kiyohito. "Amerika Shakai Kaiyo Shiso Ryakufu" (A Brief Record of American Social Reform Ideas). Matsuyama Shodai Ronshu. [Japan]. 18(4):1-25. 1967.  Covers utopias, Grange, Populism and Marxism in 19th century. 

Morgan, H. Wayne. "Populism and the Decline of Agriculture." in The Gilded Age: Revised and Enlarged Edition. Syracuse: Syracuse U P, 1970 

Nye, Russell B. Midwestern Progressive Politics, 1870-1950: A Historical Study of its Origins and Development. 398 p. East Lansing: Michigan State U P, 1951.  Finds Midwestern origins for American reform. Origins of Progressivism lay in the Populist movement. 

Osnes, Larry G. "The Birth of a Party: The Cincinnati Populist Convention of 1891." Great Plains Journal 1970 10(1): 11-24.  An early organizational convention which led to the Omaha Convention of 1892.  Discusses roles of Ignatius Donnelly, William Alfred Peffer, Jerry "Sockless" Simpson, and James B. Weaver.  While farmers and laborers were united in opposition to the "money power," differences over railroad rates, the tariff, and the eight-hour-day made coalition difficult.  The party was doomed from the beginning. 

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought: The Beginnings of Critical Realism in America, 1860-1920. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1930.  Reprint, Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1986.  See particularly, "The Middle Border Rises," pp. 259-87.  Parrington was a Kansas Populist in the mid-1890s. 

Paxson, Frederic L. Recent History of the United States, 1865 to the Present. 682 p. Boston: Houghton, 1929. Revised and enlarged edition.  "Devotes considerable space to the Populist movement and its consequences." Hicks, Populist Revolt.  

_____. History of the American Frontier, 1763-1893. 594 p. Boston: Houghton, 1924.  Frontier background of Populism. 

_____. When the West is Gone. 137 p. New York: Holt, 1930. "Concedes fully the significance of the Populist Revolt." Hicks, Populist Revolt.  

Peskin, Allan." Were the Populists Prophets?" Hayes Historical Journal 1990 9(2): 5-13.  Challenges idea that the People's Party was successful in the long term because its basic party proposals were eventually adopted and institutionalized.  Argues that free silver and the subtreasury plan were the key provisions, and were never enacted.  Also see Fred A. Shannon "C.W. Macune and the Farmers' Alliance." Current History 1955 28(166): 330-335, for argument that the Warehousing Act of 1916 fulfilled the essence of the subtreasury plan. America: History and Life, 29:5141

Piott, Steven L. The Anti-Monopoly Persuasion: Popular Resistance to the Rise of Big Business in the Midwest. 194 p. Contributions in Economics and Economic History No. 60.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985. Progressivism was a conservative counter-attack on a genuine, if somewhat nostalgic, community-based radicalism of farmers, industrial workers small retailers and consumers. 

Pollack, Norman. The Populist Response to Industrial America: Midwestern Populist Thought. 166 p. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1962.  Populists were social levelers seeking to reverse the widening gap between haves and have-nots that emerged in the late nineteenth century.  Their movement was forward-looking, accepting industrialization, and class oriented.  

Ritter, Gretchen. Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19977. Derived from the author's 1992 MIT Political Science Ph.D. dissertation, "Parties and the Politics of Money: The Antimonopoly Tradition and American Political Development, 1865-1896."  Various movements from the National Labor Union to the Populists were involved in the antimonopoly movement had an alternative political economy tradition rooted in the republican persuasion of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians.  They sought to preserve economic opportunity and political participation for all classes in all regions of the country.  Anti-monopolists were particularly concerned with reforming the monetary and banking systems, in order to mitigate economic inequality and political corruption.  The author uses three case studies to consider the impact of geography - North Carolina, Illinois, and Massachusetts.  Anti-monopolism was a strong, coherent tradition which offered an intellectually reasonable alternative to corporate liberalism.  They failed because of the combined constraints of the party system, the political culture, economic institutions, and poor strategic choices.  

Rothlisberger, Orland A. "The Populist National Convention in Sioux Falls." South Dakota History 1971 1(2): 155-165. Discusses the background and political development of the Populist Party in South Dakota. The successful securing of the National Convention in Sioux Falls in 1900 was the climax to the party's influence in the State. The small attendance was the result of internal tensions within the party.  

Sanders, Elizabeth. Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 

Scarrow, Howard A. "Duverger's Law, Fusion and the Decline of American 'Third' Parties." Western Political Quarterly 1986 39(4): 634-647.  A major explanation for third-party decline in American politics has been changes in state election laws which have eliminated what was once common practice - the nomination of one candidate by two or more political parties, usually by a major party and a smaller one.  Prior to 1900, fusion candidacies occurred at all levels of government.  

Stedman, Murray S., Jr. and Susan W. Stedman. Discontent at the Polls: A Study of Farmer and Labor Parties, 1827-1948. 190 p. New York: Columbia U P, 1950.  

Tarbell, Ida M. The Nationalizing of Business, 1878-1898. 313 p. New York: Macmillan, 1938.  Ch. 8, "The Farmers Organize" and Ch. 11, "The Controversy over Silver." 

Tindall, George B. "The People's Party." in History of United States Political Parties. vol. 2, ed. Arthur Meier Schlesinger. New York: Chelsea House, 1973. pp. 1701-31. 

Turner, Frederick Jackson. "The Problem of the West." Atlantic Monthly. 78:289-297. 1896.