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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.

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.

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.

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 -- [email protected] Cathleen Cahil -- [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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.

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.

Here's a little bonus for you. A couple of weeks ago, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) held its annual conference in Philadelphia, PA.The Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a sponsored organization of the OAH and have a large presence at the conference. It is where we hold our annual business meeting, journal editorial meeting, present our awards, sponsor panels, as well as hold a luncheon and a reception! For those of you who may not have been to the conference to participate in these events, we thought we'd bring the conference to you by providing a few short interviews with different folks who participated in SHGAPE events. This includes Dr. Eric Yellin's introduction to our sponsored panel, Government Corruption in the First Gilded Age; a short conversation with Dr. Ryan Hall who was one of the panelists on that panel, our distinguished luncheon lecturer, Dr. Mia Bay, the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's editor, Dr. Brian Ingrassia; and finally, Dr. Amy Wood and Dr. Jim Connelly, the conference co-chairs for the upcoming stand along SHGAPE conference being held in Chicago June 4-6, 2026, give a preview of what you can expect at that conference -- and there's still time to register at SHGAPE.org! Enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, we speak with renowned-Roosevelt scholar and former host of the podcast Michael Patrick Cullinane about his new book Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet. We often imagine Theodore Roosevelt as a singular force who reshaped the presidency through sheer energy and will. But Cullinane offers a different perspective, showing how Roosevelt relied on a network of informal advisors—his “Tennis Cabinet”—to generate ideas, implement policy, and expand the reach of the federal government. Together, we explore how this network functioned, what it reveals about the emergence of the administrative state, and how it reshapes our understanding of executive power, both in the Progressive Era and today. You can purchase the book directly from the University of Nebraska Press here. Use the discount code "6AS26" at checkout to receive a 40% discount. About our guest: Michael Patrick Cullinane is Professor of History at Royal Holloway University of London and a leading scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt presidency. He is the author of several books, including Theodore Roosevelt’s Ghost: The History and Memory of an American Icon and Remembering Theodore Roosevelt. His work focuses on U.S. political history, memory, and the global dimensions of American power. Further Reading: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris The Bully Pulpit by Doris Kearns Goodwin The Imperial Presidency by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We have a special treat for you today - we get to listen in on a panel from the conference Old Women, Race, and Power recorded at the Huntington Library in Pasadena CA.. The panel, "Challenging Colonial Imagery: Indigenous Centenarians and Gender in California,” explores the way old age and race intersected in ideas about Indigenous Californians, the California missions, and the Spanish fantasy past of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. https://www.huntington.org/event/old-women-race-and-power The panel includes scholars Boyd Cothran (York University)Martin Rizzo-Martinez (University of California, Santa Cruz)  Olivia Chilcote (San Diego State University) The excellent news for listeners is that there will be no ads today per the Huntington’s policies of not monetizing the content. But the Huntington does not endorse the podcast  and that the opinions expressed in the episode are those of the speakers and not the Huntington.  The images the panelists discuss are available in the following articles: Boyd Cothran and Martin Rizzo, "The Many Lives of Justiniano Roxas: The Centenarian Fantasy in American History and Memory," in Native American and Indigenous Studies, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2018, 168-204 (University of Minnesota Press) Olivia Chilcote, "Q and A with Bad Indians on 'The Belles of San Luis Rey'” American Indian Culture and Research Journal  47(3) (2024), 47-57 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Why does it feel like government can’t get things done? From housing to infrastructure to climate, even widely supported policies often stall. In this episode, Boyd Cothran speaks with Marc J. Dunkelman about his new book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back. At the center of Dunkelman’s argument is a tension inside progressivism itself. Since the late nineteenth century, reformers have oscillated between two competing impulses: a Hamiltonian desire to build strong, capable institutions that can solve large-scale problems, and a Jeffersonian instinct to restrain power, disperse authority, and guard against coercion. The Progressive Era did not resolve this tension—it institutionalized it. In this episode, we explore the Progressive Era origins of this tension, the idea of a “Second Gilded Age,” and what it might mean to build a more effective state today. Further Reading: Marc J. Dunkelman, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back Daniel Wortel-London and Boyd Cothran, “A Second Gilded Age? The Promises and Perils of an Analogy: Introduction” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 19, no. 2 (2020): 191–96. About the Guest: Marc J. Dunkelman is a fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and a contributing writer at The Atlantic. His work focuses on American political development, governance, and the history of reform. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today we are delighted to welcome a guest host, Dr. Chelsea Gibson of SUNY Binghampton, and the co-editor of the SHGAPE Blog. who is interviewing three of the 2026 SHGAPE prize winners: Carlotta Wright de la Cal, winner of the SHGAPE research grant for her project “Rule of Rail: Railroad Labor and Cross-Border Mobility in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, 1880-1930.” Nicole Martin winner of the Fischer -Calhoun article prize for “The Indian, Chinese, and Mormon Questions: The American Home and Reconstruction Politics in the West”, Pacific Historical Review 93, no. 3 (Summer 2024): 445–474. Manisha Sinha winner of the 2026 Presidents’ Book Prize for The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920 (Liveright, 2024) As many of you may know, our podcast’s sponsoring organization, Society for Historians of the GAPE or (SHGAPE) is an affiliated society of the Organization of American Historians (or OAH.  This means that we are quite engaged in the OAH’s annual conference, which is being held this year in Philadelphia on April 16-19, 2026. SHGAPE sponsors panels at the conference, and also offers workshops, lectures, a luncheon, a reception, and mentoring opportunities for emerging scholars at the annual meeting. The Society also offers a variety of awards, including book and article prizes, a graduate student essay prize, a distinguished historian award, and travel grants to the OAH for graduate students and contingent faculty. You can find out more information about these prizes and our other opportunities on the SHGAPE.org and more about the Organization of American Historians at oah.org A big congratulations to the winners and thanks to Dr. Chelsea Gibson for joining us as a guest host! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Boyd Cothran and Cathleen Cahill sit down with James H. McCommons to discuss his sweeping new book, The Feather Wars: And the Great Crusade to Save America’s Birds — publishing March 17, 2026. 📘 Pre-order now: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250286895/thefeatherwars/ At a moment when conservation feels both urgent and politically contested, McCommons takes us back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Americans nearly drove some of their most iconic bird species to extinction — not primarily for food, but for fashion. Millions of birds were killed to supply the booming plume trade. Entire rookeries were destroyed so feathers could adorn women’s hats. But The Feather Wars is about far more than birds. It is a story about how societies change. McCommons shows that reform required not only outrage, but organization; not only persuasion, but law. The eventual passage of federal wildlife protections reshaped American culture and preserved species that might otherwise have vanished. As we confront our own era of environmental crisis, this story raises enduring questions: How does a society move from normalization to moral reckoning? When does law follow culture — and when must it lead? What does it take to create durable change? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s a lot in the news these days about politics on college campuses with discussions of student protests, curriculum debates, and faculty engagement serving as hot button issues. This sudden and intense focus makes it seem as if this may be a new phenomenon, though anyone who lived through the 1960s and 70s would beg to differ.  Our guest today, Dr. Kelly L. Marino’s recent book, Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign, (NYU Press, 2024) https://nyupress.org/9781479825196/votes-for-college-women/ pushes that chronology back even further by exploring the role that female college students and alumni played in the suffrage movement as well as in shaping college activism moving into the future. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, Boyd Cothran talks with historian Patrick O’Connor about his new book, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933. Rather than treating tobacco primarily as a moral problem or a corporate success story, O’Connor approaches it as a window onto the making of the modern American state. Beginning with Civil War–era taxation and moving through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the conversation traces how tobacco became deeply embedded in federal governance—through revenue collection, market regulation, inspection and classification regimes, agricultural science, and expert bureaucracy. Along the way, we discuss how taxation helped create national markets, how “quality” and knowledge functioned as forms of power, how growers were disciplined through debt and market institutions, and how Progressive Era expertise reshaped both agriculture and state capacity. The episode also reflects on why tobacco proved so difficult to regulate or dismantle in the early twentieth century—and what this history can tell us about the long-standing challenges of governing harmful but profitable commodities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathleen talks with Dr. Hilary N. Green, whose most recent book, Unforgettable Sacrifice: How Black Communities Remembered the Civil War, was published by Fordham University Press in 2025. https://fordhampress.com/unforgettable-sacrifice-hb-9781531508531.html An exciting addition to scholarship on Civil War memory with its focus on African American traditions of memorialization, the book also offers historians important methodological tools. For Dr. Green's public history projects, see With Their Hands: https://www.davidson.edu/news/2025/10/21/memorial-brings-unacknowledged-into-story Hallowed Grounds https://www.hngreenphd.com/the-hallowed-grounds-project.html We also mentioned Dr. Martha Jones' Hard History project at Johns Hopkins University: https://hardhistory.jhu.edu/ We mentioned a number of books in our conversation including: David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard UP 2001) Barbara A. Gannon, The Won Cause: Black and White Comradeship in the Grand Army of the Republic (The University of North Carolina Press, 2011) Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (University of North Carolina Press, 2013) David Silkenat, Raising the White Flag: How Surrender Defined the American Civil War (University of North Carolina Press, 2019) Contact the host: Cathleen Cahill [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.