Plain History: The Gilded Age

03/24/25 • 61 min

4 Listeners

Corruption. Class wars. Technological splendor. The dawn of a new age of business and government. Rockefeller and Carnegie. The Gilded Age in America—roughly the 1870s through the early 1900s—was one of the most fascinating and misunderstood eras in our history. It seems like every week, news organizations claim that the U.S. is in a new Gilded Age. But what does that mean? What was the Gilded Age?

Today’s guest is Richard White, award-winning historian and author of ‘The Republic for Which It Stands,’ a mammoth history of America between the end of the Civil War and the end of the 19th century. We talk about how corruption and monopoly and power worked during that period. We talk about Rockefeller and Carnegie and Morgan, and how these giants typified the era with their business genius and their thin sense of morality. We talk about how the monopolies of this era used the government, and the government used these monopolies. And we talk about how the movements that emerged from the Gilded Age invented the modern world.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Richard White

Producer: Devon Baroldi

P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Richard White

Producer: Devon Baroldi

P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Previous Episode

ABUNDANCE! With Ezra Klein

Donald Trump is serving up a scarcity agenda to America. He and the White House say we don’t have an economy that works, so we might just need to accept a period of economic hardship. They say America cannot afford its debt, and therefore we cannot afford health care for the poor. They say America doesn’t have enough manufacturing, so we have to accept less trade. They say America doesn’t have enough housing, and so we need fewer immigrants.

America needs the opposite of this scarcity mindset to grow and thrive. We need an abundance agenda. But what does that mean? The answer to that question is in my new book, which I cowrote with the New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein. He is also today’s guest. We talk about ‘Abundance’ the book, and why it exists. And we talk about abundance the idea, and why it matters. (You can buy the book here!)

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Ezra Klein

Producer: Devon Baroldi

P.S. If you live in Seattle, Atlanta, or the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, Derek is coming your way in March! See him live at book events in your city. Tickets here!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Next Episode

Trump’s Plan to Smash the Global Economic Order

Donald Trump's second term has been a breakneck whirlwind: tariffs announced, tariffs unannounced, tariffs reannounced, allies threatened, and global coalitions ripped apart. What sort of a world are Trump and the White House trying to build?

If you stand back from the brush strokes, and take in the full mural, it is possible to see something like a grand economic strategy. One way his chief economic advisers have put it is that we’re using America’s power in the 2020s as leverage to rebalance the global economy in a way that helps U.S. companies grow faster.

There are several questions to ask about this stated economic strategy. One is whether or not it’s working. When tariffs designed to buoy the auto manufacturing economy lead instead to hundreds of layoffs among steelworkers getting walloped by trade wars—as they did this past week—it's hard to be confident that Trump's gambit is paying off.

A very different question to ask is whether Trump’s economic strategy is _economic—_or, strictly speaking, strategic—at all. Much of our geopolitical agenda today seems to be a simple extrapolation of Donald Trump’s personality. His proclivity for audacious promises. His tactic of using leverage to squeeze counterparties. His preference for mano a mano deal-making over coalitional bargains.

Today’s guests are Rogé Karma, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard. We talk about the new world order Trump seems to be accelerating us toward. But we also talk about Trump himself, an unusual leader whose governance style often seems to have more to do with personal leverage than with policy. By evaluating the White House along both of these fronts, perhaps we can begin to see around the corner and understand what kind of a world, and what kind of a global economy, Donald Trump is pulling into view.

If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [email protected].

Host: Derek Thompson

Guest: Rogé Karma and Jason Furman

Producer: Devon Baroldi

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices