The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Child labor regulation seems emblematic of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and yet federal legislation to protect children only became settled law many decades later. Professor John Fliter joins the show to discuss the history of child labor laws and how it has shaped the contemporary political debates. Essential Reading:John A. Fliter, Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children (2018).Recommended Reading:Betsy Wood, Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism (2020).Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (2002).Vincent DiGirolamo, Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys (2019).Paul Chrystal, Factory Girls: The Working Lives of Women and Children (2022).James D. Schmit, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (2010).

If any figure of the Gilded Age has major relevance on the lives of the working class today - especially those that cannot or struggle to buy a home - it is Henry George. The best-selling author and single tax advocate offered Americans and the world a big idea that could change the way governments tax its people.Essential Reading:Christopher William England, Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023).Recommended Reading:Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879).Edward T. O'Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (2015).Phillip J. Bryson, The Economics of Henry George: History's Rehabilitation of America's Greatest Early Economist (2011).Mary M. Cleveland, "The Economics of Henry George: A Review Essay," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 71, no. 2 (April 2012): 498-511. Ramesh Chandra, "Allyn Young on Henry George and the Single Tax," Review of Political Economy 34, no. 4 (December 2022): 766-88.

Historians often look for excluded voices, and that task is difficult because archives keep scarcer records of ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives. When a scholar finds records that can tell a new story it is exciting. Professor Joan Flores Villalobos accomplishes this task in the story of The Silver Women. She joins me to talk about migrant women who transformed the Panama Canal project. Essential Reading:Joan Flores Villalobos, The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (2023).Recommended Reading:Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (2004). Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (2009).David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (1977).Walter Lafeber, Panama Canal The Crisis in Historical Perspective (1978).