The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Why have we not heard about Miriam Leslie? She was one of the richest New York women, and a media tycoon. She was also a seductress who broke the era's gender norms and charlatan that concocted her origin story. Her life is riveting and no better author to bring this biography to life than Betsy Prioleau. Essential Reading:Betsy Prioleau, Diamonds and Deadlines: The Tale of Greed, Deceit, and a Female Tycoon in the Gilded Age (2022).

No one can dispute the importance of the Great War, but where the conflict began, and the ideas that set it apart from other wars is the starting point of this episode. Patrick Cohrs discusses his latest tome The New Atlantic Order and explains how the long origin of World War I began in the 1860s and has reverberated to this very day. Essential Reading:Patrick O. Cohrs, The New Atlantic Order (2022).

The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era published a roundtable called "What Came Next?: Reflections on the Aftermath(s) of the 1918-19 Flu Pandemic in the Age of COVID." Three of the participants join me to discuss how pandemics end, if they end, what lessons they teach (if any), and how they contribute to the history of a given era. The answers might surprise you!Essential Reading:Christopher McKnight Nichols, E. Thomas Ewing, K. Healan Gaston, Maddalena Marinari, Alan Lessoff, and David Huyssen, "What Came Next?: Reflections on the Aftermath(s) of the 1918-19 Flu Pandemic in the Age of COVID," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 21, no. 2 (April 2022): 111-149.Roundtable with Christopher McKnight Nichols, Nancy Bristow, E. Thomas Ewing, Joseph M. Gabriel, Benjamin C. Montoya and Elizabeth Outka “Reconsidering the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic in the Age of COVID-19”Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era19, no. 4: 642-672.