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The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

The Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Written by: Michael Patrick Cullinane
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About this listen
 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.

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

    128: Her Hat Was in the Ring: How Women Won the Right to Run for Office in the United States
    Nov 3 2026
    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)

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    1 hr and 11 mins
  • 127: Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America

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

    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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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • 126: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century

    126: Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century
    Oct 7 2026

    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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    58 mins
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