The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Latest Episodes:

127: Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America Oct 21, 2026

Show notes

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/

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126: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century Oct 07, 2026

Show notes

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)

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125: The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park Sep 23, 2026

Show notes

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)

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124: A Workplace of their Own: Rockefeller, Roche, and Labor's Battle Over Industrial Democracy Sep 09, 2026

Show notes

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

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123: Magic Lantern Art with Terry Borton Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

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

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122: The History and Legacy of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws Part 1 Jun 03, 2026

Show notes

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 GAPEhttps://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

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121: Speed Capital: Indianapolis Auto Racing and the Making of Modern America May 20, 2026

Show notes

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.

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120.5 OAH Conference Sampler May 13, 2026

Show notes

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.

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120: Theodore Roosevelt and the Tennis Cabinet May 06, 2026

Show notes

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.

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