The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

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).

Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling video games of all time, but what is the history behind the game? Dr. Tore C. Olsson joins us to talk about the game itself, how video games are teaching American history, and what historians can learn from engaging with popular culture.Essential Reading:Tore Olsson, Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (2024).Recommended Reading:Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987).Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013).Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).S. Paul O’Hara, Inventing the Pinkertons, or Spires, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being Story of the Nation’s Most Famous (and Infamous) Detective Agency (2016).William Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015).

What is anarchy? In the Gilded Age, the United States felt the convulsions of several radical ideologies, but none as violent and complex as the anarchist movement. Dr. Michael Willrich joins the show to discuss the key personalities and episodes that gave rise to a new approach to criminal justice and immigration law.Essential Reading:Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2023).Recommended Reading:Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (2009).Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878-1934 (2014).James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009).David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (1997).Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (2015).