Copyright Details

• Copyright listed as 1890

• Author: John N. Cunning

• No additional printings or editions noted (common for Donohue imprints)

This is a first edition, though the term applies loosely because Donohue titles were often printed in continuous runs without separate impressions.

📘 Book History

The New Constitution appears to be a populist-era reform text, written during a period of intense economic and political agitation among American farmers and industrial laborers.

Contextually, it belongs to the intellectual landscape surrounding:

• The Farmers’ Alliance movement

• Early labor unions

• The rise of Populism

• Agrarian demands for monetary reform, railroad regulation, and government-backed loans

The book argues for:

• Relief for overmortgaged farmers

• Economic independence for laborers

• Government intervention in monopolistic industries

• Cooperative systems for agriculture and mining

• Tax reform and political reform

This reflects widespread frustration with Gilded Age inequality and corporate power.

The text is important not as a landmark political work but as a primary source of 1890 populist sentiment.

📚 Description of Contents

Your edition includes:

• Complete text of The New Constitution

• Seventeen themed chapters on labor, taxation, railroads, government reform, and cooperative economic systems

• A preface outlining the author’s ideological purpose

• Table of contents that organizes the work as a political program

• Standard late-19th-century typography on pulp-based paper

• No illustrations

This was printed for widespread reading rather than as a luxury book—common for reform literature of the era.⭐

📦 Physical Condition

From the images provided:

Covers

• Brown cloth boards with blind-stamped ruling

• Considerable rubbing and scuffing

• Spine ends softened and frayed

• Paper spine label faded or worn

• Corners bumped

Interior

• Pages heavily toned (expected for 19th-century pulp paper)

• Some edge brittleness visible

• Text block intact

• Title page and chapter pages clean, no major stains aside from age toning

• Binding slightly shaken but holding

Overall condition: Good– to Fair+, typical for Donohue books surviving from 1890.

Special Features

• First edition, 1890, of a populist-era reform work

• Valuable as a historical artifact of late-Gilded-Age political thought

• Representative of American agrarian and labor activism

• Scarcer than mass-produced fiction of the period, though not widely sought by collectors

• No dust jacket expected—none were issued for most Donohue titles of this era

Interest today centers on:

• Historians of American labor and populism

• Collectors of early political reform literature

• Regional Chicago printing history