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123. 123: Magic Lantern Art with Terry Borton
57:29||Ep. 123The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast is back! After our summer hiatus, we're kicking off a new season and returning to our regular every-other-week release schedule. Thanks for your patience over the break — we've got a great slate of guests lined up, starting with this one.Long before Hollywood, there was a hand-painted glass slide, a smoky projection lamp, and a darkened lodge hall. For the better part of a century, the magic lantern — not the movie camera — was America's dominant screen medium, and no one worked it harder or better than Joseph Boggs Beale, a Philadelphia commercial artist who produced over 2,600 lantern slide images between 1881 and 1917.This week we're joined by Terry Borton, magic lantern historian, collector, and for twenty-five years the touring performer behind The American Magic Lantern Theater, whose new book Magic Lantern Art: The American Screen's First Great Narrative Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale (John Libbey Publishing) makes the case that Beale worked out the visual grammar of cinematic storytelling a generation before film existed. We talk about Beale's career, the business that mass-produced his images, and the surprisingly wide range of Americans — women lecturers, Black entrepreneurs, Native performers, temperance reformers, and Jacob Riis himself — who picked up the lantern to tell their own stories on their own terms.Links & Further ViewingTerry shared a few things he thought listeners would enjoy alongside the episode:A recreated Jacob Riis lantern lecture. Some years ago, Terry created a condensed recreation of one of Riis's own traveling lantern lectures for the exhibition Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half at the Museum of the City of New York and the Library of Congress. The exhibition — and this recreation — will be reprised this fall/winter at the New Museum in New York City. Watch hereDr. Toer's Amazing Magic Lantern Show. A scholarly recreation of a traveling lantern show performed for audiences of recently freed African Americans in the Reconstruction-era South, built around the real touring program of J. W. Toer, a Baptist minister and former slave. Produced as part of the Who Built America? documentary series by the American Social History Project at CUNY. Watch hereThe Museum of American Magic Lantern Shows. Terry's own virtual museum, tracing how lantern shows shaped American culture from the 1850s through the 1930s — women performers, Black performers, religious and reform lantern shows, war coverage, and more. (A few pages are still being fixed, but most of the site is up and running.) Visit the museum.Boyd Cothran -- cothran@yorku.ca Cathleen Cahil -- czc335@psu.edu
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122. 122: The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws Part 1
01:01:22||Ep. 122This week we talk to the editors and authors of a forum on The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws which was published in the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Link to the introduction in the Journal of GAPE https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-gilded-age-and-progressive-era/article/abs/history-and-legacy-of-anthony-comstock-and-the-comstock-laws/C48D5A1CAA131C5745E4A979A431B65D?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmarkJGAPE's webpage: https://www.shgape.org/journal/about-jgape/Lauren Thompson’s NYT piece on advertisements for abortifacients:https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/abortion-history-women.htmlKimberly A. Hamlin’s Free Thinker: The Extraordinary Life of the Fallen Woman Who Won the Vote https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004974Allison K. Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Woman Suffrage Movement https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo50270913.html
121. 121: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America
45:06||Ep. 121Today our guest is Dr. Brian Ingrassia Associate Professor of History at West Texas A&M University. He specializes in modern American history with a focus on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as sport history, cultural/intellectual history, and Texas history. He is also the current editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. If you listened to our OAH sampler episode last week you heard a little bit about the excellent work he does with the journal. This week we are here to talk about his most recent book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, which was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2024. We’re particularly grateful to Brian for talking with us because as many of you may know, the Indy 500 always takes place on Memorial Day Weekend, so this is a very timely episode.120.5 OAH Conference Sampler
42:00|Here's a little bonus for you. A couple of weeks ago, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) held its annual conference in Philadelphia, PA.The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a sponsored organization of the OAH and have a large presence at the conference. It is where we hold our annual business meeting, journal editorial meeting, present our awards, sponsor panels, as well as hold a luncheon and a reception! For those of you who may not have been to the conference to participate in these events, we thought we'd bring the conference to you by providing a few short interviews with different folks who participated in SHGAPE events. This includes Dr. Eric Yellin's introduction to our sponsored panel, Government Corruption in the First Gilded Age; a short conversation with Dr. Ryan Hall who was one of the panelists on that panel, our distinguished luncheon lecturer, Dr. Mia Bay, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's editor, Dr. Brian Ingrassia; and finally, Dr. Amy Wood and Dr. Jim Connelly, the conference co-chairs for the upcoming stand along SHGAPE conference being held in Chicago June 4-6, 2026, give a preview of what you can expect at that conference -- and there's still time to register at SHGAPE.org! Enjoy.120: Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet
46:50|In this episode, we speak with renowned-Roosevelt scholar and former host of the podcast Michael Patrick Cullinane about his new book Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet. We often imagine Theodore Roosevelt as a singular force who reshaped the presidency through sheer energy and will. But Cullinane offers a different perspective, showing how Roosevelt relied on a network of informal advisors—his “Tennis Cabinet”—to generate ideas, implement policy, and expand the reach of the federal government. Together, we explore how this network functioned, what it reveals about the emergence of the administrative state, and how it reshapes our understanding of executive power, both in the Progressive Era and today.You can purchase the book directly from the University of Nebraska Press here. Use the discount code "6AS26" at checkout to receive a 40% discount.About our guest:Michael Patrick Cullinane is Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London and a leading scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt presidency. He is the author of several books, including Theodore Roosevelt’s Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon and Remembering Theodore Roosevelt. His work focuses on U.S. political history, memory, and the global dimensions of American power.Further Reading:Theodore Rex by Edmund MorrisThe Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns GoodwinThe Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
119. 119: Old Women, Race, and Power
01:04:44||Ep. 119We have a special treat for you today - we get to listen in on a panel from the conference Old Women, Race, and Power recorded at the Huntington Library in Pasadena CA.. The panel, "Challenging Colonial Imagery: Indigenous Centenarians and Gender in California,” explores the way old age and race intersected in ideas about Indigenous Californians, the California missions, and the Spanish fantasy past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. https://www.huntington.org/event/old-women-race-and-powerThe panel includes scholars Boyd Cothran (York University)Martin Rizzo-Martinez (University of California, Santa Cruz) Olivia Chilcote (San Diego State University) The excellent news for listeners is that there will be no ads today per the Huntington’s policies of not monetizing the content. But the Huntington does not endorse the podcast and that the opinions expressed in the episode are those of the speakers and not the Huntington. The images the panelists discuss are available in the following articles: Boyd Cothran and Martin Rizzo, "The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas: The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory," in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2018, 168-204 (University of Minnesota Press)Olivia Chilcote, "Q and A with Bad Indians on 'The Belles of San Luis Rey'” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 47(3) (2024), 47-57
118: Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress -- And How to Bring it Back
01:03:58|Why does it feel like government can’t get things done? From housing to infrastructure to climate, even widely supported policies often stall. In this episode, Boyd Cothran speaks with Marc J. Dunkelman about his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back. At the center of Dunkelman’s argument is a tension inside progressivism itself. Since the late nineteenth century, reformers have oscillated between two competing impulses: a Hamiltonian desire to build strong, capable institutions that can solve large-scale problems, and a Jeffersonian instinct to restrain power, disperse authority, and guard against coercion. The Progressive Era did not resolve this tension—it institutionalized it. In this episode, we explore the Progressive Era origins of this tension, the idea of a “Second Gilded Age,” and what it might mean to build a more effective state today.Further Reading:Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It BackDaniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran, “A Second Gilded Age? The Promises and Perils of an Analogy: Introduction” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19, no. 2 (2020): 191–96.About the Guest:Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work focuses on American political development, governance, and the history of reform.