The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

How does a family of Jewish homesteaders interact with the indigenous people of the Great Plains? Journalist Rebecca Clarren explains how her family immigrated from Russia to South Dakota, lured by the promise of free land and how generations later she writes how it came at the expense of the Lakota. This book might grapple with the past, but it is not hard to find the contemporary relevance. Essential Reading:Rebecca Clarren, The Cost of Free Land: Jews, Lakota, and an American Inheritance (2023).Recommended Reading:Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020).Pekka Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (2019).Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023).

There are some years, and some seasons within a given year, that bear witness to immense change. Chris Wimmer, a podcaster and public historian, tells the story of the Summer of 1876, one such year and one such season.Essential Reading:Chris Wimmer, The Summer of 1876 (2023).Recommended Reading:Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927 (2013).T. J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (2017).

One of the most consequential wars in global history happened in 1898, and despite the 125th anniversary of that war, there has been little attention paid to this conflict. One exception is the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions. The museum's curator Taína Caragol and historian Kate Clarke Lemay who created the exhibition join the show to explain why it was so important to showcase the events of that fateful year.Essential Reading:Taína Caragol and Kate Clarke Lemay, 1898: Visual Culture and U.S. Imperialism in the Caribbean and the Pacific (2023).1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revision (exhibition website)Recommended Reading:Bonnie Miller, From Liberation to Conquest: The Visual and Popular Cultures of the Spanish-American War of 1898 (2011).Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood (2000).Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2001).

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian T. J. Stiles joins the show to talk about George Armstrong Custer, and the art of biography writing. As one of the leading authors of the Gilded Age we also take on the question of periodization, uncomfortable history, and unlikeable historical figures.Essential Reading:T.J. Stiles, Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America (2016).Recommended Reading:Robert Utley, Frontier Regulars: The United States Army and the Indian, 1866-1891 (1974).Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987).

Better known to Californians as Mortimer, this week's episode takes us to the Wild West and the Pacific coast's most wanted outlaw Charlie Flinn. Matthew Bernstein joins the show to discuss his latest book Hanging Charlie Flinn, a page-turning tale of theft, murder, and jailbreaks. Essential Reading:Matthew Bernstein, Hanging Charley Flinn: The Short and Violent Life of the Boldest Criminal in Frontier California (2023).

The architecture of the Gilded Age differed from that which came before and after. Phillip James Dodd joins me to discuss the various ways Beaux Arts design transformed the era, and the people responsible for the architectural renaissance that drew upon Greek and Roman style for the new American republic.Essential Reading:Phillip James Dodd, An American Renaissance: Beaux-arts Architecture in New York City (2021).Recommended Reading:Wayne Craven, Gilded Mansions: Grand Architecture and High Society (2009).Zachery J. Violette, The Decorated Tenement: How Immigrant Builders and Architects Transformed the Slum in the Gilded Age (2019).Susanne Hinman, The Grandest Madison Square Garden: Art, Scandal, and Architecture in Gilded Age New York (2019).

Daniel Coit Gilman is one of the Gilded Age's most important university presidents, and finally we have a book about his influence at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins universities and the Carnegie Institute. His biographer is a university president, too. Michael T. Benson, president of Carolina Coastal University joins the show to talk about Gilman and the start of modern universities in America.Essential Reading:Michael T. Benson, Daniel Coit Gilman and the Modern University (2023).Recommended Reading:John Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (2019, third edition). Jonathan Cole, The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected (2012).Hal Boyd and Michael Benson, "The Public University: Recalling Higher Education’s Democratic Purpose," NEA Journal (2015). Daniel Coit Gilman’s inaugural speech (1876 at Johns Hopkins).

As the labor movement pushed for greater recognition, pay, and conditions in the workplace (on land), the sailors of America had a tougher fight. The nature of maritime commerce made sailors foreign in a domestic sense, as the Supreme Court would rule. Geography complicated their place in constitutional law, and made them at once victims and agents of the American empire. Will Riddell joins me to discuss these labor issues and his new book On the Waves of Empire.Essential Reading:William D. Riddell, On the Waves of Empire: U.S. Imperialism and Merchant Sailors, 1872-1924 (2023).Recommended Reading:Julie Greene, “The Wages of Empire: Capitalism, Expansion, and Working-Class Formation,” in Daniel E. Bender and Jana K. Lipman (eds.), Making the Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism (2015) 35-58.Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2018).Leon Fink, Sweatshops of the Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, From 1812 to the Present (2011).Moon-Ho Jung, Menace to Empire: Anti-Colonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the U.S. National Security State (2022).Marilyn Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (2019),

The 2023 Spring seminar series at the Breakers, hosted by the Preservation Society of Newport County focused on the transformation of the United States in the Gilded Age. Listen to CEO of the Society Trudy Coxe and Director of Curation and Programming Leslie Jones talk about the series. Here also are the links to the various lectures:Michael Patrick Cullinane "The Gilded Age: Past and Present"Matthew Bird "The Gilded Years: The First Information Age"Will B. Mackintosh "The Many Playgrounds of the Industrial Age"T.J. Stiles "Age of the Machine: The Fight to Reinvent Democracy in the Gilded Age"Richard Guy Wilson "Creating a New American Image: Architecture, 1870-1910"Nancy Unger "Under the Gold-Plating: Everyday Americans in the Gilded Age"Visit the Newport Preservation Society