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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In early March 1906, the United States Army and the Filipino Constabulary attacked a insurgent outpost of Moros on the island of Jolo. Over 1,000 men, women, and children were killed in the battle, and less than two dozen Americans lost their lives. It was deemed an atrocity by all observers, even the soldiers that took part. Professor Kim Wagner recalls this violent episode in his latest book.

Essential Reading:

Kim Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006).

Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982).

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000).

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During the nineteenth century, the Zouave was everywhere. The uniform characterized by an open, collarless jacket, baggy trousers, and a fez, originated in French Algeria, but became common amongst military men in France, the United States, and the Papal States, taking on a life of its own. Historians Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown join us to explain the often-misunderstood outfit and its connection to colonialism, race, gender, fashion, and military tactics, and dress.

Essential Reading:

Carol E. Harrison and Thomas J. Brown, Zouave Theaters: Transnational Military Fashion and Performance (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (2006).

John Bierman, Napoleon III and His Carnival Empire (1988).

Lorien Foote, The Gentlemen and the Roughs: Violence, Honor, and Manhood in the Union Army (2010).

Charles A. Coulombe, The Pope’s Legion: The Multinational Fighting Force that Defended the Vatican (2008).

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is one of the best-selling video games of all time, but what is the history behind the game? Dr. Tore C. Olsson joins us to talk about the game itself, how video games are teaching American history, and what historians can learn from engaging with popular culture.

Essential Reading:

Tore Olsson, Red Dead's History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and America's Violent Past (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987).

Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (2013).

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (2011).

William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).

S. Paul O’Hara, Inventing the Pinkertons, or Spires, Sleuths, Mercenaries, and Thugs: Being Story of the Nation’s Most Famous (and Infamous) Detective Agency (2016).

William Link, Southern Crucible: The Making of an American Region (2015).

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What is anarchy? In the Gilded Age, the United States felt the convulsions of several radical ideologies, but none as violent and complex as the anarchist movement. Dr. Michael Willrich joins the show to discuss the key personalities and episodes that gave rise to a new approach to criminal justice and immigration law.

Essential Reading:

Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (2023).

Recommended Reading:

Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror (2009).

Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878-1934 (2014).

James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009).

David M. Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (1997).

Kenyon Zimmer, Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (2015).

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The Gilded Age West was a place to disappear for some. For Ray Hamilton and Jake Sargent - men from distinguished eastern families that sought privacy after scandals turned their lives apart - the West could not shield them from ongoing intrigue. Dr. Maura Jane Farrelly joins the show to talk about her latest book Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent, which detail these men's lives and those around them in Jackson, Wyoming.

Essential Reading:

Maura Jane Farrelly, Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Wendy Gonaver, The Peculiar Institution and the Making of Modern Psychiatry, 1840-1880 (2019).

Aaron Freundschuh, The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth Century Paris (2017).

Julie Miller, Abandoned: Foundlings in Nineteenth-Century New York City (2008).

Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children he Saved and Failed (2001).

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One of the most controversial and innovative motion pictures in American history is D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation about the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Lost Cause mythology. Michael Connolly joins Dr. Robert Bland, Dr. Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, and Dr. Paul McEwan to discuss the way this film shaped, and continues to shape our conversations about race and politics.

Essential Watching:

D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915).

Recommended Reading:

Allyson Hobbs, "A Hundred Years Later "Birth of a Nation" Hasn't Gone Away," New Yorker, December 13, 2015.

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The intersections of race and class or work and power has tantalizing effects on our understanding of history. It can reshape our appreciation of socio-cultural norms and the way we define the Gilded Age. Joseph Jewell's latest book White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era takes the reader through the changing social structures caused by industrialization and Reconstruction, and the attendant anxieties these changes wrought among White communities.

Essential Reading:

Joseph O. Jewell, White Man's Work: Race and Middle-Class Mobility into the Progressive Era (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Arnoldo De León, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (1982).

Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (2004).

Erika Lee, At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (2003).

Raúl A. Ramos, Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821-1861 (2008).

Philip F. Rubio, There's Always Work at the Post Office: African American Postal Workers and the Fight for Jobs, Justice, and Equality (2010).

Eric S. Yellin, Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America (2013).

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