The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Great War transformed the world order, and it also revolutionized societies and individual experiences. In one of the year's most interesting books about the war's impact, Dr. Evan Sullivan explores the lives of blinded veterans and how their injuries completely changed the way we think about disability. Evan joins the show to discuss his book and the wider implications of disability studies for historical scholarship.Essential Reading:Evan Sullivan, Constructing Disability after the Great War: Blind Veterans in the Progressive Era (2024).Recommended Reading:Beth Linker, War's Waste: Rehabilitation in World War I America (2011).Audra Jennings, Out of the Horrors of War: Disability Politics in World War II America (2016).Catherine J. Kudlick, "Disability History: Why We Need Another 'Other'," American Historical Review 108, no. 3 (June 2003).

With 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).

Presidential 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).

What 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).

I 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).

The heyday of the boomtowns of Northern Louisiana is long since passed, but their mark on the geography and environment still lingers. Henry Wiencek joins us to discuss his new book, Oil Cities, and the people who built, occupied, and abandoned these towns.Essential Reading:Henry Wiencek, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930 (2024).Recommended Reading:Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (2000).Terence Daintith, Finders Keepers? How the Law of Capture Shaped the World Oil Industry (2010).Daneil Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2009).Perry W. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (1971)

While the Gilded Age led to the rise of robber barons and railroad tycoons, it also led to the proliferation of another type of character, the con artist. Frank Garmon Jr. joins us to discuss the life Charles Cowlam, a confidence man and charlatan who spent decades making his money by swindling everyone from prime ministers and presidents to working men and wealthy women.Essential Reading:Frank Garmon, Jr., A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age (2024).Recommended Reading:Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (2006).Brian P Luskey, Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (2020).Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1982).Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987).

In 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).