History That Doesn't Suck

The imagery is not lost on Kurt, who now personifies Mary Howitt's poem, The Spider and the Fly.

True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous, I had been and am. But why will you say that I am mad?

How then am I mad? Hearken and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult.

He had the eye of a vulture, a pale blue eye with a film over it.

I think it was his eye. Yes, it was this.

while there were skeletons aplenty in John Rockefeller's closet, he was not a brigand or embezzler or stock manipulator in the manner of the early Jay Gould. Many of the accusations against him are for violating standards as reformers wished them to be, not as they actually were.

The History of the Standard Oil Company by Ida M. Tarbell, author of The Life of Lincoln.

Suddenly, at the very heyday of this confidence, a big hand reached out from nobody knew where to steal their conquest and throttle their future. The suddenness and the blackness of the assault on their business stirred to the bottom their manhood and their sense of fair play and the whole region arose in a revolt which is scarcely paralleled in the commercial history of the United States.

throughout her series, Tarbell acknowledges Standard Oil's legitimate greatness and recognizes the extraordinary business acumen of John D. Rockefeller,

Where did you get that stuff?' Ida answers, 'Mr. Rogers, you can't for a moment think that I would tell you where I got it. You will recall my efforts to get from you anything more than a general denial that these practices of espionage so long complained of were untrue, could be explained by legitimate competition. You know this bookkeeping record is true.

You are today the most famous woman in America,' and he continues, half-joking, 'People universally speak of you with such irreverence that I'm getting sort of afraid of you.

sociable and shy, deliberate and impulsive, domineering and flexible, extravagant and frugal, worldly and religious, inscrutably reserved and deeply sentimental.

by 1874, most of the coal land in northeastern Pennsylvania was controlled by the railroads. By 1900, most of the railroads were controlled by Pierpont Morgan.

I would also recommend to add to your pantheon of autobiographies. You get to read is Hawaii story by Hawaii's queen, uh, by Queen Lily Okolani.

She's a good writer. She's a phenomenal writer. The prose is excellent.

Uh, and in fact, she's, she's an excellent poet.

So I recommend that strongly for anyone interested.

a vote against annexing the islands after February 4th was a vote against the troops

both sides committed atrocities, some large and some small, but for the most part, the war was executed without the kind of wholesale slaughter that was all too common in that period.

The imperialist myth of selfless Americans saving their little brown brothers from the violent tyranny of Aguinaldo and the Tagalogs has long been discredited. The current view of a brutal and racist soldiery slaughtering defenseless natives has been unchallenged for far too long. The actual war was a far more complex and challenging phenomenon than either of these superficial interpretations acknowledge.

This is the type of news that deserves 24-hour coverage and some truth-stretching sensationalism

It's worth noting, as Steve Luxemburg does in his history of Plessy v. Ferguson, titled Separate, that the article does so casually, thus assuming even in this early decade that its Northern readers understand and know the term.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could. But when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.

I must not only punish, but punish with impunity.

He prided himself on his connoisseurship in wine.

In this respect, I did not differ from him materially. I was skillful in the Italian vintages myself and bought largely whenever I could.

It was about dusk one evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season that I encountered my friend.

And then you look at what's happening in the Gilded Age, the primary focus of expansion is the West. Well, sure. I mean, even by the time we get to World War I, we're still going to be trying in some ways to be inward. Oh, you don't feel that way. No, no, or trying. I think the key word there is trying. Right. Well, ebbs and flows. I mean, this is the thing is that the progressive era, I mean, you see, and you'll talk about this in upcoming episodes. You get to the point where you clearly see that in 1898, it's just, well, this is it. We've done this. And so there's going to be the Philippine War, which is going to last years and millions of lives. Philippines is going to be a United States territory till just after World War II. Right. You've got expansion. We de facto control Haiti from 1915, I believe it is, when we go in. Wilson orders the Marines to go in after a coup and then takes all their money, puts it in a bank in New York and says, you guys can have this back when you act the way we want you to. You've got Cuba. So what I'm saying is we back off from some of that later on, but it's that back and forth. Gilded Age is a time where the United States is primarily focused on trying to figure out how to heal these wounds between the North and the South. And the West, as Heather Cox Richardson argued very well in West for Mathematics, the West becomes the place where suddenly we're all Americans again, and that's the focus there.