Populist Era. No historical period conforms precisely to a specific span of years, and the Populist Era is no exception. The events of the 1890s—the time period known as the Populist Era—reflected social and economic pressures, and reactions to those pressures, that had been building for decades. Similarly, the Populist movement itself, a response to long‐term political, economic, and social changes, was rooted in earlier agrarian protest movements—the Farmers' Alliance movement of the 1880s, the Granger movement of the 1870s—and even in rural folkways antedating the Civil War .

Populist Politics.