The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, lynching took place across the country, even if we think of it as a phenomenon exclusive to southern states. Acclaimed historian and author of civil rights Philip Dray tells a different story, of a lynching in New York that rocked the small town of Port Jervis. The murder of Robert Lewis by a mob has great significance for how we remember the past and consider the present day.

Essential Reading:

Philip Dray, A Lynching at Port Jervis: Race and Reckoning in the Gilded Age (2022).

Philip Dray, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2003).

Recommended Reading:

Richard Brown, Strains of Violence: Historical Studies of Violence and Vigilantism (1975).

Dan Carter, Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South (1979).

A.J. Williams-Myers, Long Hammering: Essays on the Forging of an African-American Presence in the Hudson River Valley (1994).

Jacqueline Goldsby, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature (2006).

Michael J, Pfeifer, Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society 1847-1947 (2004).

Amy Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 (2009).

Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor and Politics in the Post Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001).

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The Gilded Age had its fare share of political scandals, and the Star Route scandal ranks as one of its most important. It exposed the spoils system at a time when public debate about good government filled the headlines. Why has this scandal remained so obscure when compared to others like Credit Mobilier or the Whiskey Ring. Professor Shawn Peters joins the show to discuss his latest book When Bad Men Combine, the story of the star route scandal.

Essential Reading:

Shawn Francis Peters, When Bad Men Combine: The Star Route Scandal and the Twilight of Gilded Age Politics (2023).

Recommended Reading:

Winifred Gallagher, How the Post Office Created America (2016).

Lewis L. Gould, The Republicans: A History of the Grand Old Party (2014).

Adelbert Bower Sageser, The First Two Decades of the Pendleton Act: A Study of Civil Service Reform (1935).

Thomas C. Reeves, Gentleman Boss: the Life of Chester Alan Arthur (1975).

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Child labor regulation seems emblematic of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, and yet federal legislation to protect children only became settled law many decades later. Professor John Fliter joins the show to discuss the history of child labor laws and how it has shaped the contemporary political debates.

Essential Reading:

John A. Fliter, Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children (2018).

Recommended Reading:

Betsy Wood, Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism (2020).

Hugh D. Hindman, Child Labor: An American History (2002).

Vincent DiGirolamo, Crying the News: A History of America's Newsboys (2019).

Paul Chrystal, Factory Girls: The Working Lives of Women and Children (2022).

James D. Schmit, Industrial Violence and the Legal Origins of Child Labor (2010).

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If any figure of the Gilded Age has major relevance on the lives of the working class today - especially those that cannot or struggle to buy a home - it is Henry George. The best-selling author and single tax advocate offered Americans and the world a big idea that could change the way governments tax its people.

Essential Reading:

Christopher William England, Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Crafting of Modern Liberalism (2023).

Recommended Reading:

Henry George, Progress and Poverty (1879).

Edward T. O'Donnell, Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age (2015).

Phillip J. Bryson, The Economics of Henry George: History's Rehabilitation of America's Greatest Early Economist (2011).

Mary M. Cleveland, "The Economics of Henry George: A Review Essay," The American Journal of Economics and Sociology 71, no. 2 (April 2012): 498-511.

Ramesh Chandra, "Allyn Young on Henry George and the Single Tax," Review of Political Economy 34, no. 4 (December 2022): 766-88.

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Historians often look for excluded voices, and that task is difficult because archives keep scarcer records of ordinary people leading seemingly ordinary lives. When a scholar finds records that can tell a new story it is exciting. Professor Joan Flores Villalobos accomplishes this task in the story of The Silver Women. She joins me to talk about migrant women who transformed the Panama Canal project.

Essential Reading:

Joan Flores Villalobos, The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal (2023).

Recommended Reading:

Velma Newton, The Silver Men: West Indian Labour Migration to Panama, 1850-1914 (2004).

Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America's Empire at the Panama Canal (2009).

David McCullough, The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870–1914 (1977).

Walter Lafeber, Panama Canal The Crisis in Historical Perspective (1978).

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This special episode is a reading by author Aaron Stark from his new book Disrupting Time, an account of the Waltham Watch Company and the international espionage that led to its demise.

https://www.aaronstarkbooks.com/

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The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first federal legislation to prohibit an entire nation of people from coming to the United States. It instigated a century or more or immigration regulations and codified "illegal" immigration. Dr. Ben Railton joins the show to explore the act. Ten years ago, Ben wrote about how the legislation still reverberates throughout the twentieth century, and in this episode we bring that history to bear on current events.

Essential Reading:

Benjamin Railton, The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us about America (2013).

Recommended Reading:

Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (2017).

Jane Hong, Opening the Gates to Asia: A Transpacific History of How America Repealed Asian Exclusion (2019).

Erika Lee, America for Americans and The Making of Asian America (2016).

Liel Leibovitz and Matthew Miller, Fortunate Sons: The 120 Chinese Boys Who Came to America, Went to School, and Revolutionized an Ancient Civilization (2011).

Beth Lew-Williams, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (2021).

Robert Weir, Knights Unhorsed: Internal Conflict in a Gilded Age Social Movement (2000).

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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:

Patricia Strach and Kathleen S. Sullivan, The Politics of Trash: How Governments Used Corruption to Clean Cities, 1890–1929 (2022)

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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Edith Wharton ranks as one of the Gilded Age's most prolific and popular writers. In this episode, Professor Stacy Holden tells us about her research on Wharton's lesser known travelogue In Morocco, a revealing account of the author's travels to the French and Spanish colony. It tells us a great deal about American and European imperialism, and the Orientalism that pervaded her thinking.

Essential Reading:

Edith Wharton, In Morocco (1920).

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (2007).

Recommended Reading:

Julie Olin-Ammentorp, Edith Wharton’s Writings from the Great War (2004).

Alan Price, The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War (1996).

Andrew Patrick, America’s Forgotten Middle East Initiative: The King-Crane Commission of 1919 (2015). 

Andrew Priest, Designs on Empire (on the podcast in 2022).

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