The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

It had to happen: an episode about Theodore Roosevelt. I'm surprised it took ten episodes to get here! Prof. Benjamin Wetzel and I double as interviewer and interviewee in a conversation about our recent books about Roosevelt. Ben's explores TR's religiousity, a new vein of research that has been overlooked. My book shares new sources for the first time. Both depict TR in unique treatments. Essential Reading:Benjamin Wetzel, Theodore Roosevelt: Preaching from the Bully Pulpit (2021).Michael Patrick Cullinane, Remembering Theodore Roosevelt (2021).Recommended Reading:Christian F. Reisner, Roosevelt's Religion (1922).Kathleen Flake, The Politics of American Religious Identity: The Seating of Senator Reed Smoot, Mormon Apostle (2004).Stacy A. Cordery, Alice: Alice Roosevelt Longworth, from White House Princess to Washington Power Broker (2008).Hermann Hagedorn, The Roosevelt Family of Sagamore Hill (1954).

What is a Rotary Club? Who is a Rotarian? The answer might surprise you. This club has over 35,000 offices around the world, in almost every country. It began in 1905 in Chicago, and its history tells the story of American capitalism, racism, gender bias, and class identity. Independent scholar Brendan Goff talks with me about his new book Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism, an extensively researched book and a deep dive on the organization.Essential Reading:Brendan Goff, Rotary International and the Selling of American Capitalism (2021).Recommended Reading:Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871-1933 (2002).Paul A. Kramer,“Embedding Capital: Political-Economic History, the United States and the World,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 15 (July 2016): 331-362.Roland Marchand, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business (1998).Khalil Muhammed, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (2010).Peter James Hudson, Bankers and Empire: How Wall Street Colonized the Caribbean (2017).

The Philippine Revolution is a seminal moment in global history that we too often view through the lens of American expansion and racial ideologies. Dr. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, author of Asian Place, Filipino Nation, offers a new way to think about the revolution in the context of Japanese ascendancy and Asian ideas of race. In doing so, we see how the Philippine Revolution became central to South East Asian anti-colonial movements. More than any other episode, this one pushes listeners to re-center our perspective on the Global South in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.Essential Reading:Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, Asian Place, Filipino Nation (2020).Additional Reading:Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (1997).Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century(2002).Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought(2007).