The heyday of the boomtowns of Northern Louisiana is long since passed, but their mark on the geography and environment still lingers. Henry Wiencek joins us to discuss his new book, Oil Cities, and the people who built, occupied, and abandoned these towns.

Essential Reading:

Henry Wiencek, Oil Cities: The Making of North Louisiana’s Boomtowns, 1901-1930 (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (2000).

Terence Daintith, Finders Keepers? How the Law of Capture Shaped the World Oil Industry (2010).

Daneil Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (2009).

Perry W. Howard, Political Tendencies in Louisiana (1971)

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While the Gilded Age led to the rise of robber barons and railroad tycoons, it also led to the proliferation of another type of character, the con artist. Frank Garmon Jr. joins us to discuss the life Charles Cowlam, a confidence man and charlatan who spent decades making his money by swindling everyone from prime ministers and presidents to working men and wealthy women.

Essential Reading:

Frank Garmon, Jr., A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (2006).

Brian P Luskey, Men Is Cheap: Exposing the Frauds of Free Labor in Civil War America (2020).

Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (1982).

Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (1987).

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In early March 1906, the United States Army and the Filipino Constabulary attacked a insurgent outpost of Moros on the island of Jolo. Over 1,000 men, women, and children were killed in the battle, and less than two dozen Americans lost their lives. It was deemed an atrocity by all observers, even the soldiers that took part. Professor Kim Wagner recalls this violent episode in his latest book.

Essential Reading:

Kim Wagner, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History (2024).

Recommended Reading:

Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006).

Stuart Creighton Miller, Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903 (1982).

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (2000).

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