The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Professors Patricia Strach and Kathleen Sullivan are better known in political science circles as "The Garbage Girls." They have been researching the history and politics of trash collection for nearly a decade, which culminates in a most important book called The Politics of Trash. They join me to talk about why your waste matters.Essential Reading:Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (2022)Recommended Reading:Joel A. Tarr, Search for the Ultimate Sink: Urban Pollution in Historical Perspective (1996).Martin V. Melosi, Garbage in the Cities: Refuse, Reform, and the Environment (2004).Stanley K. Schultz and Clay McShane, “To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation, and City Planning in Late-Nineteenth America,” The Journal of American History 65, no. 2 (September 1978): 389-411Carl A. Zimring, Clean and White: A History of Environmental Racism in the United States (2016).Kimberley S. Johnson, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age before Brown (2010).Carol Nackenoff and Julie Novkov, eds., Statebuilding from the Margins: Between Reconstruction and the New Deal (2014).Jessica Trounstine, Segregation by Design: Local Politics and Inequality in American Cities (2018).Lily Baum Pollans, Resisting Garbage: The Politics of Waste Management in American Cities (2021).

Edith Wharton ranks as one of the Gilded Age's most prolific and popular writers. In this episode, Professor Stacy Holden tells us about her research on Wharton's lesser known travelogue In Morocco, a revealing account of the author's travels to the French and Spanish colony. It tells us a great deal about American and European imperialism, and the Orientalism that pervaded her thinking.Essential Reading:Edith Wharton, In Morocco (1920).Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (2007).Recommended Reading: Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004). Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (1996). Andrew Patrick, America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (2015). Andrew Priest, Designs on Empire (on the podcast in 2022).

Last year, we had Professor Thomas Ruys Smith with us to talk about his book Christmas Past. Keeping in the festive spirit, Tom has returned, and with co-conspirator Professor Hilary Emmett to do a special holiday reading of a Gilded Age classic Five Little Peppers. This was one of the biggest stories of its day and it launched Margaret Sidney's career into the stratosphere of best known authors. In this episode Hilary reads a chapter from the republished story.Margaret Sidney, Five Little Peppers and How They Grew (UEA Publishing Project, 2022).