We sometimes seem to be living in a reenactment of the Gilded Age: tariffs, territorial expansion, oligarchic control of politics, assassination attempts, a democracy straining at the seams. What did it take to leave that tumultuous, surprisingly violent period behind—and what were the costs of the reforms adopted to end it?
The person to ask about this is Jon Grinspan, who has the coolest day job of any historian working today—he’s the political curator of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. It’s his job to maintain the museum’s collection of artifacts from the politics of yesteryear, and even to collect artifacts from the present that future curators, historians, and citizens will need in order to understand this period of historic events that we are living through.
Jon is the author of three books, mostly recently Wide Awake: The Forgotten Force That Elected Lincoln and Spurred the Civil War (2024), as well as The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915 (2019), which we mostly focus on in this conversation.
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