There’s a lot in the news these days about politics on college campuses with discussions of student protests, curriculum debates, and faculty engagement serving as hot button issues. This sudden and intense focus makes it seem as if this may be a new phenomenon, though anyone who lived through the 1960s and 70s would beg to differ.

Our guest today, Dr. Kelly L. Marino’s recent book, Votes for College Women: Alumni, Students, and the Woman Suffrage Campaign, (NYU Press, 2024) https://nyupress.org/9781479825196/votes-for-college-women/ pushes that chronology back even further by exploring the role that female college students and alumni played in the suffrage movement as well as in shaping college activism moving into the future.

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In this episode of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Podcast, Boyd Cothran talks with historian Patrick O’Connor about his new book, The Political Reconstruction of American Tobacco, 1862–1933.

Rather than treating tobacco primarily as a moral problem or a corporate success story, O’Connor approaches it as a window onto the making of the modern American state. Beginning with Civil War–era taxation and moving through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the conversation traces how tobacco became deeply embedded in federal governance—through revenue collection, market regulation, inspection and classification regimes, agricultural science, and expert bureaucracy.

Along the way, we discuss how taxation helped create national markets, how “quality” and knowledge functioned as forms of power, how growers were disciplined through debt and market institutions, and how Progressive Era expertise reshaped both agriculture and state capacity. The episode also reflects on why tobacco proved so difficult to regulate or dismantle in the early twentieth century—and what this history can tell us about the long-standing challenges of governing harmful but profitable commodities.

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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

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