The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Michael Patrick Cullinane
  • 4.5 (120)
  • History
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The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a free podcast about the seismic transitions that took place in the United States from the 1870s to 1920s. It's for students, teachers, researchers, history buffs, and anyone who wants to learn more about how our past connects us to the present. It is hosted by Boyd Cothran, professor of U.S. and Global history at York University, and Cathleen D. Cahill, Walter L. Ferree and Helen P. Ferree Professor in Middle-American History at Penn State University.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  1. 1d ago

    128: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States

    Today we are talking about Wendy E. Chmielewski and Jill Norgren’s wonderful Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States. The book starts with the astonish fact that over 6,000 women candidates ran for elected office before the ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920! This history of women’s campaigning and office holding, they argue offers a different story of women’s fight for equal rights than the more familiar suffrage story and that it deserves much more attention than it has received. As you will hear in our conversation, this book is paired with a digital history project also called Her Hat Was in the Ring. Chmielewski and Norgren combed through local, county, and state records and searched newspaper databases to find women officeholders and candidates. The impressive project offers bibliographic and other information about the women who ran. The book, however, places those individual stories into the larger context of nineteenth-century political changes. It ask why women became office holders before they could vote, why male electors chose to vote for them, and how the debates and discussions around female office holding changed over time. As they move chronologically from the 1850s to 1920, Chmielewski and Norgren point to the importance of married women’s property acts in creating political standing for women as well as other ideas like maternalism and gendered ideas about women’s place in society opening opportunities for them. They also highlight the importance of understanding the US system of federalism and the many different state constitutions that determined both women’s suffrage rights and rules around women’s office holding. The story, they argue, looks very different at the state and local level than it does at the national level. And it is a story that historians have generally overlooked. I hope you enjoy the conversation with Chmielewski and Norgren as much as I did. We covered a lot, but there’s so much more in the book and the database. Be sure to look at both and don’t forget to get out there and vote! The link to the book is here: https://nyupress.org/9781479847082/her-hat-was-in-the-ring/ The link to the database can be found here: https://herhat.historyit.com Other books mentioned in the episode include Jill Norgren's Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President (NYU) and Robyn Muncy's Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, UP) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    128: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States

  2. Oct 21

    127: Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America

    On this week’s episode we discuss Andrew Wender Cohen’s Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America, a rollicking biography of a man who went by many names including Louis Bieral or Louis Clark or sometimes Spanish Louis. He was born in Chile when it was a part of the Spanish empire, and his life spanned the hemisphere. He was a gangster, a horseman, a gambler, a boxer, a politician, an assassin, a bodyguard, a sailor in the navy who fought pirates in the South China Sea who later fought in the Union Army and became a Civil War hero. And those are just some of the things he did in his fascinating and full life. Cohen has carefully reconstructed his biography and illuminated the world of nineteenth century America where vice and politics were intertwined and where identities were malleable! Here’s a link to today’s book, Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century Americahttps://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gangster-of-new-york/D8410C6334B17087CFE6018497E136AA And a link to Cohen’s earlier book, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, where he first encountered Birel: https://wwnorton.com/books/Contraband/ Cohen also mentioned Tim Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York: https://wwnorton.com/books/A-Pickpockets-Tale/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    127: Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America

  3. Oct 7

    126: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century

    Wage work was supposed to "kill the Indian and save the man" — that was the theory behind a century of federal Indian policy, from boarding school outing programs to postwar urban relocation. This week we talk with historian Colleen O'Neill about her new book, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century, which argues that Native workers turned that same tool of dispossession into one of the central vocabularies for asserting sovereignty itself. We trace this story from Carlisle's outing system through the New Deal, postwar Relocation and Termination, the rise of the Tribal Employment Rights Ordinance movement in the 1970s, and the transformation of tribes into employers in the era of Indian gaming. Colleen O'Neill is a professor of history at Utah State University and a former coeditor of the Western Historical Quarterly. She is also the author of Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. Links: Colleen O'Neill, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2026) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    126: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century

  4. Sep 23

    125: The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park

    Yosemite didn't just get discovered — it got made, over and over, by every visitor who ever showed up to see it. This week we talk with historian Michael W. Childers about his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, which argues that the anonymous millions of tourists — not just Muir, Mather, and Adams — are the real protagonists of the park's history. We trace Yosemite from the Mariposa Battalion's 1851 invasion of the valley through the 1864 land grant, the U.S. Cavalry's improvised early administration, the rise of automobile tourism and Mission 66, the long fight over Indian Field Days and Native belonging in the valley, and the overcrowding crisis that's still playing out today. Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, where he specializes in the modern American West, environmental history, and tourism. He is also the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association's 2013 Ullr Award. Links: Michael W. Childers, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park (University of Nebraska Press, 2026) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    125: The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park

  5. Sep 9

    124: A Workplace of their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy

    This week we are joined by María E. Montoya to discuss her new book, A Workplace of Their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor’s Battle Over Industrial Democracy, just published by Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/a-workplace-of-their-own-9780197551691?cc=us&lang=en& The book opens with a question: who owned the American workplace in early 20th-century? This question was particularly urgent in the period of the Colorado labor wars. Those conflicts featured a series of strikes punctuated by the deadly violence of Ludlow in 1914 and in Columbine in 1927. These two notorious episodes of industrial violence frame the story and demonstrate what was at stake in the Mountainous West. Many different groups-- including laborers, unions, governments, and capitalists – had ideas about how to deal with the dramatic problems raised by industrial labor and who should be making those decisions. Montoya focuses on the strategies of two industrial capitalists – John D. Rockefeller Jr and Josephine Roche – easterners who each controlled mining companies in Colorado. They both attempted to solve the divide between labor and capital and shape industrial democracy but through very different ideas about company towns, arbitration, maternalism, and engagement with unions. In Colorado their ideas confronted the regional specificities of the industry in that place.  Dr. Montoya mentioned Robyn Muncy's biography of Josephine Roche, Relentless Reformer: Josephine Roche and Progressivism in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton UP, 2016) https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691173528/relentless-reformer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    124: A Workplace of their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy

  6. Aug 26

    123: Magic Lantern Art with Terry Borton

    The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast is back! After our summer hiatus, we're kicking off a new season and returning to our regular every-other-week release schedule. Thanks for your patience over the break — we've got a great slate of guests lined up, starting with this one. Long before Hollywood, there was a hand-painted glass slide, a smoky projection lamp, and a darkened lodge hall. For the better part of a century, the magic lantern — not the movie camera — was America's dominant screen medium, and no one worked it harder or better than Joseph Boggs Beale, a Philadelphia commercial artist who produced over 2,600 lantern slide images between 1881 and 1917. This week we're joined by Terry Borton, magic lantern historian, collector, and for twenty-five years the touring performer behind The American Magic Lantern Theater, whose new book Magic Lantern Art: The American Screen's First Great Narrative Artist, Joseph Boggs Beale (John Libbey Publishing) makes the case that Beale worked out the visual grammar of cinematic storytelling a generation before film existed. We talk about Beale's career, the business that mass-produced his images, and the surprisingly wide range of Americans — women lecturers, Black entrepreneurs, Native performers, temperance reformers, and Jacob Riis himself — who picked up the lantern to tell their own stories on their own terms. Links & Further Viewing Terry shared a few things he thought listeners would enjoy alongside the episode: A recreated Jacob Riis lantern lecture. Some years ago, Terry created a condensed recreation of one of Riis's own traveling lantern lectures for the exhibition Jacob A. Riis: Revealing New York's Other Half at the Museum of the City of New York and the Library of Congress. The exhibition — and this recreation — will be reprised this fall/winter at the New Museum in New York City. Watch here Dr. Toer's Amazing Magic Lantern Show. A scholarly recreation of a traveling lantern show performed for audiences of recently freed African Americans in the Reconstruction-era South, built around the real touring program of J. W. Toer, a Baptist minister and former slave. Produced as part of the Who Built America? documentary series by the American Social History Project at CUNY. Watch here The Museum of American Magic Lantern Shows. Terry's own virtual museum, tracing how lantern shows shaped American culture from the 1850s through the 1930s — women performers, Black performers, religious and reform lantern shows, war coverage, and more. (A few pages are still being fixed, but most of the site is up and running.) Visit the museum. Boyd Cothran -- cothran@yorku.ca Cathleen Cahil -- czc335@psu.edu Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  7. Jun 3

    122: The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws Part 1

    This week we talk to the editors and authors of a forum on The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws which was published in the Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Link to the introduction in the Journal of GAPE https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-gilded-age-and-progressive-era/article/abs/history-and-legacy-of-anthony-comstock-and-the-comstock-laws/C48D5A1CAA131C5745E4A979A431B65D?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_source=bookmark JGAPE's webpage: https://www.shgape.org/journal/about-jgape/ Lauren Thompson’s NYT piece on advertisements for abortifacients: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/opinion/sunday/abortion-history-women.html Kimberly A. Hamlin’s Free Thinker: The Extraordinary Life of the Fallen Woman Who Won the Vote  https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324004974 Allison K. Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Woman Suffrage Movement  https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/P/bo50270913.html Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  8. May 20

    121: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America

    Today our guest is Dr. Brian Ingrassia Associate Professor of History at West Texas A&M University. He specializes in modern American history with a focus on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as well as sport history, cultural/intellectual history, and Texas history. He is also the current editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. If you listened to our OAH sampler episode last week you heard a little bit about the excellent work he does with the journal. This week we are here to talk about his most recent book, Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America, which was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2024. We’re particularly grateful to Brian for talking with us because as many of you may know, the Indy 500 always takes place on Memorial Day Weekend, so this is a very timely episode. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

    121: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America
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The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a free podcast about the seismic transitions that took place in the United States from the 1870s to 1920s. It's for students, teachers, researchers, history buffs, and anyone who wants to learn more about how our past connects us to the present. It is hosted by Boyd Cothran, professor of U.S. and Global history at York University, and Cathleen D. Cahill, Walter L. Ferree and Helen P. Ferree Professor in Middle-American History at Penn State University.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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