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

cdcahill@psu.edu

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

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 cothran@yorku.ca

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

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/

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