Episode 132: Armies of Deliverance, or, a New Interpretation of the American Civil War

Explicit content warning

10/30/19 • 67 min

"Of all the ongoing debates over the Civil War," writes my guest Elizabeth Varon, "perhaps none has proven so difficult to resolve as the issue of Northern war aims." Some historians have emphasized, particularly in the last few years, the important point of consensus between many Republicans and Democrats that the Union needed to be saved. Others have emphasized the growth of the antislavery movement in the Republican Party as the force that gave coherence to the North's war effort. But each of these approaches, observes Varon, "focuses on only part of the broad Northern political spectrum." Varon's suggestion is that "deliverance" is the concept that unites all the different northern perspectives. Northerners believed that they were bringing deliverance to the South: to the poor whites who were economically controlled by the wealthy slaveholders; to a region blighted with chattel slavery; and to the enslaved themselves. And of course Southerners also believed in the narrative of deliverance, only they believed that they were delivering themselves from those who would take their property; and their chief war aim was to deliver the border states of Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland from Federal oppression. Elizabeth Varon is the Langbourne M. Williams Professor of American History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of numerous books; Armies of Deliverance: A New History of the Civil War is her most recent, and it's the focus of our discussion.

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Episode 131: Red Meat Republic, or, the American Beef Economy of the Late Nineteenth Century

Americans love red meat. More particularly, they love beef. Always have. Archaeology of colonial America shows that British North Americans ate as much beef as they possibly could. Fish? No thank you. Beef? More, please. This British chauvinism for beef (the French, after all, called the English "les rosbifs") became an American chauvinism. But where colonial Americans ate their beef in a variety of strange cuts, mostly boiled, by the post Civil War having the freshest possible beef became a passion, a health craze in fact. We've talked about cattle drives in Episode 101 with Tim Lehman. This time, though, we're eating the whole cow. I talk with Joshua Specht, whose new book Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America describes the entire "beef economy" of the nineteenth century–from the seizing of ranch land from Plains Indians, to the dining room tables of New York and Indiana. Along the way he touches not only on cattle drives, but on feedlots, packing plants, and "beef riots" that happened in the most unusual places. It's a delicious podcast, even if you're Vegan.

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Episode 133: Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers, or, Rabies in the City

Hello, in antebellum and late 19th century New York City, nothing could clear a street faster than the cry of “mad dog!” Rabies was perhaps the most feared disease of the era; and because animals and humans lived in such close proximity, even as New York was growing into a city of millions, that proximity led people to always have in the back of their mind a dread of what might possibly happen to either them or their children. As Jessica Wang describes in her wittily titled new book Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840-1920, rabies overlaps many areas of transformation in an era of transformation. Medicine, urban politics, urban geography, and cultural imagination all take their turn under her investigative gaze. The result is not a history of a disease, but the history of a society at a particularly important moment in its self-creation. Jessica Wang is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. She has previously written American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War.