The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

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]
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In this episode of The Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, Boyd Cothran speaks with historian Daniel Wortel-London about his new book, The Menace of Prosperity, a sweeping history of New York City and the political economy of urban growth from the aftermath of the Civil War through the late twentieth century.

The conversation centres on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, when New York’s leaders increasingly tied the city’s finances to real estate development, municipal debt, and rising property values. Wortel-London introduces two key concepts—social costs and fiscal imaginaries—to explain how elite-driven prosperity repeatedly generated fiscal crises, inequality, and instability, even as critics advanced alternative visions rooted in cooperation, public ownership, and democratic control of urban resources.

Along the way, Boyd and Daniel discuss the 1870s fiscal crisis and fears of “monstrous growth,” Gilded Age fiscal radicals and the cooperative commonwealth, Henry George and the single tax, Progressive Era debates over municipal ownership and planning, and interwar struggles over housing and economic stabilization. The episode concludes by tracing how these late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century choices shaped the New Deal, the 1970s fiscal crisis, and contemporary debates over housing, development, and inequality in New York.

The Menace of Prosperity is available from the University of Chicago Press

Contact the host:
Boyd Cothran can be reached at [email protected]
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There are a few people that embody a period. Isabella Stewart Gardner knew many of the the movers and shakers of the Gilded Age and lived from 1840-1924. Her story, and her compulsion to buy the art of the age, makes her a great lens through which to understand the Gilded Age. Dr. Natalie Dykstra joins the show to discuss her latest biography of Bella.

Natalie Dykstra, Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner (2024).

The webpage for Clara Endicott Sear's Fruitland Museum can be found at https://thetrustees.org/place/fruitlands-museum/

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In this festive episode of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era podcast, we welcome back food historian Becky L. Diamond to discuss her latest book, The Gilded Age Christmas Cookbook. Using recipes as historical evidence, Becky takes us into nineteenth-century kitchens to explore how Christmas took shape during the Gilded Age—an era defined by inequality, immigration, and the rise of modern consumer culture.

We talk about forgotten holiday treats like sugar plums, German and Central European influences on the American Christmas table, the labor behind seasonal abundance, and the challenges of translating nineteenth-century recipes for modern kitchens. Along the way, Becky shows how food opens a powerful window onto aspiration, memory, and domestic life in the Gilded Age.

This episode builds on Becky’s earlier appearance on the podcast for The Gilded Age Cookbook and reminds us why food history belongs at the centre of Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholarship.

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Becky L. Diamond, The Gilded Age Christmas Cookbook (Lyons Press)

Becky L. Diamond, The Gilded Age Cookbook

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While Cathleen and I are working on new content for the podcast—lots of great episodes are on the way—we’re also taking time to revisit some of Michael’s excellent past interviews.

For my second “best of” pick, I chose Episode 54, The Allure of Empire, which first aired on July 4, 2023. In this episode, Michael talks with historian Chris Suh about his award-winning book The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion. Suh’s work invites us to rethink the Gilded Age and Progressive Era through the lens of empire—tracing how U.S. expansion in the Pacific intertwined with racial exclusion and the politics of belonging at home.

It’s a rich, thought-provoking conversation that shows how the legacies of the Gilded Age still shape America’s place in the world today.

We hope you’ll enjoy (re)listening as much as we did—and, as always, we’d love to hear which past episodes have been your favourites!

Essential Reading:

Chris Suh, The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion (2023).

Recommended Reading:

David C. Atkinson, The Burden of White Supremacy: Containing Asian Migration in the British Empire and the United States (2016).

Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (2005).

Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (2006).

Akira Iriye, Pacific Estrangement: Japanese and American Expansion, 1897– 1911 (1972).

Richard S. Kim, The Quest for Sovereignty: Korean Immigration Nationalism and U.S. Sovereignty, 1905– 1945 (2011).
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