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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While Cathleen and I are working on new content for the podcast—stay tuned, there’s lots of exciting stuff coming—we wanted to take a moment to revisit some of Michael’s excellent past episodes.

For my first “best of” pick, I chose Episode 17, Oceans of Grain, which originally aired on March 2, 2022. In this episode, Michael talks with historian Scott Reynolds Nelson about how the global trade in wheat reshaped the modern world. It’s a fascinating look at how the Gilded Age and Progressive Era fit into a much larger story of empire, capitalism, and global connection.

When the episode first aired, Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and Nelson’s discussion of the Black Sea grain routes suddenly felt eerily relevant. Listening again now, it’s striking how powerfully this conversation links nineteenth-century global trade to the world we live in today.

We hope you’ll enjoy (re)listening as much as we did—and we’d love to know which episodes stand out as your favourites!

Essential Reading:

Scott Reynolds Nelson, Oceans of Grain: How American Wheat Remade the World (2022).

Recommended Reading:

Neal Ascherson, The Black Sea (1996).

Bettany Hughes, Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities (2017).

Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989).

Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and their Lasting Impact (2004).

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Boyd and I are working on new content for the podcast-we have lots of good stuff planned for the future.

But in the meantime, we wanted to take a moment to revisit some of Michael’s excellent content.

We each picked two of the previous episodes as our “best of” but we totally acknowledge that we could have picked many more than two; this was a very tough choice, but we hope you enjoy (re)listening as much as we did. And we'd love to know which are your favorite episodes!

Christopher McKnight Nichols and Nancy Unger, A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. (John Wiley & Sons, 2017)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118913994

For a nice short introduction to historical thinking with some more definitions, check out Flannery Burke and Thomas Andrews' Perspectives essay, "What Does it Mean to Think Historically": https://www.historians.org/perspectives-article/what-does-it-mean-to-think-historically-january-2007/

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