1877: The Great Strike and the Red Specter of the Commune (Part One)

06/30/16 • 67 min

If you think 2016 is a turbulent year for the United States, try 1877. The country is, as one observer puts it, "on the edge of a volcano." Four years into a crippling economic crisis, a hopelessly corrupt government is beset by domestic terrorism, frontier conflicts, and class war. As cities and factories replace small towns and family farms, new, unregulated corporate empires are built on the backs of a new industrial working class. Faith in the system, and in the economic and political promise of American life, is fading. And looming over it all is the specter of the Paris Commune - an uprising from below that can only end in blood...

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Buffalo Bill, the Mythic West, and the Imperial Frontier

William F. Cody - better known as Buffalo Bill - did more than any other person to translate the history of the American West into the language of popular culture. This episode explores how he molded his own past, and the history of the frontier, into a grand story of national progress and conquest in dime novels, stage plays, his trademark Wild West show, and even film. As the United States plunged headlong into overseas adventures in Cuba, China, and the Philippines, Cody's spectacular arena shows gave Americans a framework for understanding their country's new role in the world, and the meanings of frontiers both old and new.

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1877: The Great Strike and the Red Specter of the Commune (Part Two)

When a railroad employee walks off the job in Baltimore, it triggers a violent chain of events that engulfs the industrialized North. From Pittsburgh to San Francisco, city after city erupts in rioting and street battles as railroad men, factory workers, and the unemployed take on militias, paramilitary groups, and the US Army in a spontaneous revolt against the new industrial order. Railyards burn and urban neighborhoods become battlegrounds. Pundits, politicians, corporate leaders, socialists, and union leaders hail the birth of an exterminationist class war. And through the smoke, the dawn of a new era can be glimpsed...