Episodes
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What do philanthropist Jane Stanford, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln have in common? They all conducted séances. Spiritualism was popular in the Gilded Age, and Lily Dale, NY is the epicenter of the movement. From the voices that gave you Dig: A History Podcast comes Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale. One of the authors - Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik - joins the show to discuss their new book.
Essential Reading:
Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (2003).
Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (2008).
Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (1997).
Cathy Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (2009).
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I often say how similar the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is like our contemporary times. With this show, I take it back. Cassie Chadwick was able to swindle the banks in a way that would be impossible today. Listen to Annie Reed discuss her debut book, Imposter Heiress.
Essential Reading:
Annie Reed, Imposter Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, the Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age (2024).
Further Reading:
David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (2007).
Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game (2017).
Amy Reading, The Mark Inside (2012).
Hilary Spurling, La Grande Therese: The Greatest Scandal of the Century (2000).
Tori Telfer. Confident Women (2021).
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Episodes manquant?
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The heyday of the boomtowns of Northern Louisiana is long since passed, but their mark on the geography and environment still lingers. Henry Wiencek joins us to discuss his new book, Oil Cities, and the people who built, occupied, and abandoned these towns.
Essential Reading:
Henry Wiencek, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930 (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (2000).
Terence Daintith, Finders Keepers? How the Law of Capture Shaped the World Oil Industry (2010).
Daneil Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2009).
Perry W. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (1971)
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While the Gilded Age led to the rise of robber barons and railroad tycoons, it also led to the proliferation of another type of character, the con artist. Frank Garmon Jr. joins us to discuss the life Charles Cowlam, a confidence man and charlatan who spent decades making his money by swindling everyone from prime ministers and presidents to working men and wealthy women.
Essential Reading:
Frank Garmon, Jr., A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (2006).
Brian P Luskey, Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (2020).
Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1982).
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987).
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In early March 1906, the United States Army and the Filipino Constabulary attacked a insurgent outpost of Moros on the island of Jolo. Over 1,000 men, women, and children were killed in the battle, and less than two dozen Americans lost their lives. It was deemed an atrocity by all observers, even the soldiers that took part. Professor Kim Wagner recalls this violent episode in his latest book.
Essential Reading:
Kim Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006).
Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982).
Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000).
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During the nineteenth century, the Zouave was everywhere. The uniform characterized by an open, collarless jacket, baggy trousers, and a fez, originated in French Algeria, but became common amongst military men in France, the United States, and the Papal States, taking on a life of its own. Historians Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown join us to explain the often-misunderstood outfit and its connection to colonialism, race, gender, fashion, and military tactics, and dress.
Essential Reading:
Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown, Zouave Theaters: Transnational Military Fashion and Performance (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (2006).
John Bierman, Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire (1988).
Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (2010).
Charles A. Coulombe, The Pope’s Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican (2008).
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Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling video games of all time, but what is the history behind the game? Dr. Tore C. Olsson joins us to talk about the game itself, how video games are teaching American history, and what historians can learn from engaging with popular culture.
Essential Reading:
Tore Olsson, Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987).
Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013).
Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).
William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).
S. Paul O’Hara, Inventing the Pinkertons, or Spires, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being Story of the Nation’s Most Famous (and Infamous) Detective Agency (2016).
William Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015).
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What is anarchy? In the Gilded Age, the United States felt the convulsions of several radical ideologies, but none as violent and complex as the anarchist movement. Dr. Michael Willrich joins the show to discuss the key personalities and episodes that gave rise to a new approach to criminal justice and immigration law.
Essential Reading:
Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2023).
Recommended Reading:
Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (2009).
Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878-1934 (2014).
James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009).
David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (1997).
Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (2015).
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The Gilded Age West was a place to disappear for some. For Ray Hamilton and Jake Sargent - men from distinguished eastern families that sought privacy after scandals turned their lives apart - the West could not shield them from ongoing intrigue. Dr. Maura Jane Farrelly joins the show to talk about her latest book Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent, which detail these men's lives and those around them in Jackson, Wyoming.
Essential Reading:
Maura Jane Farrelly, Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Wendy Gonaver, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (2019).
Aaron Freundschuh, The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth Century Paris (2017).
Julie Miller, Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2008).
Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children he Saved and Failed (2001).
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One of the most controversial and innovative motion pictures in American history is D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation about the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Lost Cause mythology. Michael Connolly joins Dr. Robert Bland, Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, and Dr. Paul McEwan to discuss the way this film shaped, and continues to shape our conversations about race and politics.
Essential Watching:
D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915).
Recommended Reading:
Allyson Hobbs, "A Hundred Years Later "Birth of a Nation" Hasn't Gone Away," New Yorker, December 13, 2015.
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The intersections of race and class or work and power has tantalizing effects on our understanding of history. It can reshape our appreciation of socio-cultural norms and the way we define the Gilded Age. Joseph Jewell's latest book White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era takes the reader through the changing social structures caused by industrialization and Reconstruction, and the attendant anxieties these changes wrought among White communities.
Essential Reading:
Joseph O. Jewell, White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Arnoldo De León, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982).
Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (2004).
Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (2003).
Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861 (2008).
Philip F. Rubio, There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (2010).
Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (2013).
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This episode is a feed drop from the Brattleboro Literary Cocktail Hour, a monthly event hosted by the Brattleboro Literary Festival. I am in conversation with Ed O'Keefe, the author of The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women who Created a President. Given Roosevelt's lifetime overlaps the Gilded Age and Progressive Era quite neatly, and the women in his life have gotten short shrift, I thought this would be of interest to podcast listeners.
Please also check out the podcast sponsor SHGAPE (Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era)
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SHOW SPONSOR SHGAPE & The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:
I have never thought of funeral directors as the preservationists of Gilded Age architecture, but they are. Thanks to Dr. Dean Lampros's cross-disciplinary research on the cultural history of these residential funeral parlours we see the remnants of the Gilded Age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dean joins me to discuss his new book, and the amazing research he has compiled.
Essential Reading:
Dean Lampros, Preserved: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home in America (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963).
Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (2002).
Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2004).
Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (2005).
Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (2008).
Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (2010).
Michael Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 – 1920 (2015).
Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2018).
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The Irish are best known for migrating to American cities along the east coast, notably Boston and New York. Dr. Alan Noonan joins the show to explain how the Irish also moved to the American West, and settled among mining communities in places like Butte and Virginia City. Noonan's narrative is rich with stories about race, class, religion, and imagined communities, making his book a must read for scholars of industrialization and migration.
Essential Reading:
Alan J. M. Noonan, Mining Irish-American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920 (2022).
Recommended Reading:
Michael MacGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike (2003).
Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1988).
Janet Floyd, Claims and Speculation: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age (2012).
Elliot J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (2015).
David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1920 (1989).
Liping Zhu, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (2000).
J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America (1998).
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There are a few people that embody a period. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew many of the the movers and shakers of the Gilded Age and lived from 1840-1924. Her story, and her compulsion to buy the art of the age, makes her a great lens through which to understand the Gilded Age. Dr. Natalie Dykstra joins the show to discuss her latest biography of Bella.
Essential Reading:
Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (2024).
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Thousands of Christian missionaries left the United States in search of souls to save. They often found trouble. And almost always became non-governmental diplomats, whether as translators or unofficial representatives. Dr. Emily Conroy-Krutz joins the show to explain how they influenced international relations in unexpected ways.
Essential Reading:
Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (2024).
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Jacob Schiff, Joseph Seligman, Marcus Goldman, and the Lehman Brothers have one thing in common. All were Jewish immigrants who made a fortune as financiers in the United States. Best-selling author and journalist Daniel Schulman tells their story and explains how left an indelible mark on American society.
Essential Reading:
Daniel Schulman, The Money Kings: The Epic Story of the Jewish Immigrants Who Transformed Wall Street and Shaped Modern America (2023).
Recommended Reading:
Susie Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan (2013).
Roger Lowenstein, America's Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve (2016).
Christopher Shaw, Money, Power, and the People: The American Struggle to Make Banking Democratic (2019).
Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild (1998).
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In this special episode, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is taken over by popular podcast 2 Complicated 4 History and hosts Dr Lynn Price Robbins and Isaac Loftus. 2 Complicated 4 History is a show that examines the "deleted scenes" of history. In each episode, a different guest bringing a fresh perspective to the history you thought you knew.
This episode leads with the question: Is it the government's job to legislate the social behavior of its citizens? In the Progressive Era, many elites believed that it was, and they created institutions to "fix" non compliance. Lynn and Isaac are joined by Dr. Erin Bush to discuss child delinquency and social control at the turn of the twentieth century.
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Economics might study trade, commerce, and financial markets, but the discipline explores human interaction as much as any other subject. The idea of free trade, especially the idea espoused by Richard Cobden, intersected with the millennial pursuit of peace like two halves of the same walnut. Marc William Palen joins the show to explain the legacy of Cobden and others in the global story of free trade and pacifism.
Essential Reading:
Marc William Palen, Pax Economica: Left Wing Visions of a Free Trade World (2024).
Recommended Reading:
Johanna Bockman, Markets in the Name of Socialism: The Left-Wing Origins of Neoliberalism (2011).
Eric Helleiner, The Neomercantilists: A Global Intellectual History (2021).
Douglas Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (1998).
Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2018).
Thomas Zeiler, Capitalist Peace: A History of American Free-Trade Internationalism (2022).
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When did modern intelligence gathering begin? The Gilded Age, of course. Dr. Mark Stout joins the show to discuss his book World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence. The advent of new technologies and the necessities of modern war show how a major transition occurred between the Civil War and World War II.
Essential Reading:
Mark Stout, World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence (2024).
Further Reading:
T. R. Brereton, Educating the U.S. Army: Arthur L. Wagner and Reform, 1875-1905 (2000).
Jeffrey M. Dorwart, The Office of Naval Intelligence: The Birth of America's First Intelligence Agency, 1865-1918 (1979).
Lori A. Henning, Harnessing the Airplane: American and British Cavalry Responses to a New Technology, 1903-1939 (2019).
Brian McAllister Linn, "Intelligence and Low-Intensity Conflict in the Philippine War, 1899-1902," Intelligence and National Security 6, no. 1 (1991): 90-114.
Betsy Rohaly Smoot, From the Ground Up: American Cryptology during World War I (2023).
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