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The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
The Politics of Trash
Ep. 40
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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:
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): 389-411
Carl 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).
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91. Learning for Work
54:13||Ep. 91With the industrial revolution came a revolution in the education of Americans. In this episode, Connie Goddard discusses her latest book on the industrial education system that taught Americans how to do trades, skilled labor activities, and generally find work in factories and industrial jobs.Essential Reading:Connie Goddard, Learning for Work: How Industrial Education Fostered Democratic Opportunity (2024).Recommended Reading:Kelly Ann Kolondy, Normalites: The First Professionally Prepared Teachers in the United States (2014).Christopher J. Lucas, Teacher Education in America: Reform Agendas for the Twenty-First Century (1997).Helen Proctor and Kellie Burns, The Curriculum of the Body and the School as Clinic: Histories of Public Health and Schooling (2023).
90. Gilded Age Mythology: A Roundtable
01:07:29||Ep. 90Presidential elections often serve as periodic demarcations from one historical epoch to another. 1876 has often been seen as the beginning of the Gilded Age. This roundtable episode brings together leading scholars of American law and politics to discuss the virtues and vices of this approach with the aim of determining if we can make sense of American political history from the Gilded Age to the present. Essential Reading: Richard Slotkin, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America (2024).Cynthia Nicoletti, Secession on Trial: The Treason Prosecution of Jefferson Davis (2017).Recommended Reading: Heather Cox Richardson, "Reconstruction and the Gilded Age and Progressive Era" in A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (2017).
89. Spiritualism's Place
50:16||Ep. 89What do philanthropist Jane Stanford, author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln have in common? They all conducted séances. Spiritualism was popular in the Gilded Age, and Lily Dale, NY is the epicenter of the movement. From the voices that gave you Dig: A History Podcast comes Spiritualism's Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale. One of the authors - Dr. Elizabeth Garner Masarik - joins the show to discuss their new book.Essential Reading:Averill Earls, Sarah Handley-Cousins, Marissa Rhodes, and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, Spiritualism’s Place: Reformers, Seekers, and Seances in Lily Dale (2024).Recommended Reading:Robert S. Cox, Body and Soul: A Sympathetic History of American Spiritualism (2003).Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (2008).Bret E. Carroll, Spiritualism in Antebellum America (1997).Cathy Gutierrez, Plato's Ghost: Spiritualism in the American Renaissance (2009).
88. Imposter Heiress
41:59||Ep. 88I often say how similar the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is like our contemporary times. With this show, I take it back. Cassie Chadwick was able to swindle the banks in a way that would be impossible today. Listen to Annie Reed discuss her debut book, Imposter Heiress.Essential Reading:Annie Reed, Imposter Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, the Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age (2024).Further Reading:David Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie (2007).Maria Konnikova, The Confidence Game (2017).Amy Reading, The Mark Inside (2012).Hilary Spurling, La Grande Therese: The Greatest Scandal of the Century (2000).Tori Telfer. Confident Women (2021).
87. Oil Cities
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86. A Wonderful Career in Crime
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85. Massacre in the Clouds
55:26||Ep. 85In early March 1906, the United States Army and the Filipino Constabulary attacked a insurgent outpost of Moros on the island of Jolo. Over 1,000 men, women, and children were killed in the battle, and less than two dozen Americans lost their lives. It was deemed an atrocity by all observers, even the soldiers that took part. Professor Kim Wagner recalls this violent episode in his latest book.Essential Reading:Kim Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (2024).Recommended Reading:Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006).Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982).Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000).
84. Zouave Theaters
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83. Red Dead History
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