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).

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