This is the grave of Alexander Shepherd. Born in 1835 in Washington, D.C., Shepherd grew up working class, dropped of school at the age of 13, and got a job as a plumber's assistant. He was evidently good at it and worked his way up...
Gilded Age
This is the grave of Nelson Aldrich. Born in 1841 in Foster, Rhode Island, Aldrich came from a family with long connections to the New England colonial elite, but which.
This is the grave of Diamond Jim Brady. Born in New York in 1856, James Buchanan Brady grew in an Irish household. James Buchanan is a pretty gross president to.
You can't really tell here, but from this angle you can kind of see (or I could when I took the picture, it's the white distant thing between the trees) the tomb of Cornelius Vanderbilt, which is in a private part of this cemetery because...
This is the grave of Stanley Matthews. Born in 1824 in Cincinnati, Matthews' family was evidently pretty well off in Porkopolis. He was able to attend Kenyon College, graduating in.
Why do we celebrate this genocidal and generally horrible person anyway? Turns out that like everything else in this country, it goes back to the history of American racism and.
For seemingly forever, the end of Reconstruction has been taught as the "Compromise of 1877, where Democrats agreed to give the presidency to Rutherford Hayes in return for the end of Reconstruction." Now this is interesting. It turns out that the whole thing was invented...
The great historian Richard White has an really interesting essay on the impeachment of Secretary of War William Belknap in 1876. The House managers, in their final brief of Feb..
This is the grave of Samuel Pomeroy. Born in 1816 in Southampton, Massachusetts, Pomeroy grew up comfortable and went to Amherst College, graduating in 1838. He taught school in New.
For the latest LGM podcast, I talked to Michael Hiltzik, the Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the Los Angeles Times, about his latest book Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America. In this conversation, we talk about the craziness of this...
I'm teaching a graduate seminar this fall on Late 19th Century America. Figured you might all want to read along, so long as you can keep up with the workload.
We often complain about the unfair Senate and how all the big empty states in the middle of the country give Republicans an inherent advantage that is impossible to overcome..