This episode is a feed drop from the Brattleboro Literary Cocktail Hour, a monthly event hosted by the Brattleboro Literary Festival. I am in conversation with Ed O'Keefe, the author of The Loves of Theodore Roosevelt: The Women who Created a President. Given Roosevelt's lifetime overlaps the Gilded Age and Progressive Era quite neatly, and the women in his life have gotten short shrift, I thought this would be of interest to podcast listeners.

Please also check out the podcast sponsor SHGAPE (Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era)

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SHOW SPONSOR SHGAPE & The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:

I have never thought of funeral directors as the preservationists of Gilded Age architecture, but they are. Thanks to Dr. Dean Lampros's cross-disciplinary research on the cultural history of these residential funeral parlours we see the remnants of the Gilded Age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dean joins me to discuss his new book, and the amazing research he has compiled.

Essential Reading:

Dean Lampros, Preserved: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home in America (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963).

Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (2002).

Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2004).

Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (2005).

Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (2008).

Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (2010).

Michael Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 – 1920 (2015).

Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2018).

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The Irish are best known for migrating to American cities along the east coast, notably Boston and New York. Dr. Alan Noonan joins the show to explain how the Irish also moved to the American West, and settled among mining communities in places like Butte and Virginia City. Noonan's narrative is rich with stories about race, class, religion, and imagined communities, making his book a must read for scholars of industrialization and migration.

Essential Reading:

Alan J. M. Noonan, Mining Irish-American Lives: Western Communities from 1849 to 1920 (2022).

Recommended Reading:

Michael MacGowan, The Hard Road to Klondike (2003).

Kerby A. Miller, Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America (1988).

Janet Floyd, Claims and Speculation: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age (2012).

Elliot J. Gorn, Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America (2015).

David M. Emmons, The Butte Irish: Class and Ethnicity in an American Mining Town, 1875-1920 (1989).

Liping Zhu, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky Mountain Mining Frontier (2000).

J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble: A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets off a Struggle for the Soul of America (1998).

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