On this week’s episode we discuss Andrew Wender Cohen’s Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century America, a rollicking biography of a man who went by many names including Louis Bieral or Louis Clark or sometimes Spanish Louis. He was born in Chile when it was a part of the Spanish empire, and his life spanned the hemisphere. He was a gangster, a horseman, a gambler, a boxer, a politician, an assassin, a bodyguard, a sailor in the navy who fought pirates in the South China Sea who later fought in the Union Army and became a Civil War hero. And those are just some of the things he did in his fascinating and full life. Cohen has carefully reconstructed his biography and illuminated the world of nineteenth century America where vice and politics were intertwined and where identities were malleable!

Here’s a link to today’s book, Gangster of New York: A Violent Life in Nineteenth Century Americahttps://www.cambridge.org/core/books/gangster-of-new-york/D8410C6334B17087CFE6018497E136AA

And a link to Cohen’s earlier book, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century, where he first encountered Birel: https://wwnorton.com/books/Contraband/

Cohen also mentioned Tim Gilfoyle’s A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth Century New York: https://wwnorton.com/books/A-Pickpockets-Tale/

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Wage work was supposed to "kill the Indian and save the man" — that was the theory behind a century of federal Indian policy, from boarding school outing programs to postwar urban relocation. This week we talk with historian Colleen O'Neill about her new book, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century, which argues that Native workers turned that same tool of dispossession into one of the central vocabularies for asserting sovereignty itself. We trace this story from Carlisle's outing system through the New Deal, postwar Relocation and Termination, the rise of the Tribal Employment Rights Ordinance movement in the 1970s, and the transformation of tribes into employers in the era of Indian gaming.

Colleen O'Neill is a professor of history at Utah State University and a former coeditor of the Western Historical Quarterly. She is also the author of Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century.

Links:

• Colleen O'Neill, Waging Sovereignty: Native Americans and the Transformation of Work in the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2026)

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Yosemite didn't just get discovered — it got made, over and over, by every visitor who ever showed up to see it. This week we talk with historian Michael W. Childers about his new book, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park, which argues that the anonymous millions of tourists — not just Muir, Mather, and Adams — are the real protagonists of the park's history. We trace Yosemite from the Mariposa Battalion's 1851 invasion of the valley through the 1864 land grant, the U.S. Cavalry's improvised early administration, the rise of automobile tourism and Mission 66, the long fight over Indian Field Days and Native belonging in the valley, and the overcrowding crisis that's still playing out today.

Michael W. Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University, where he specializes in the modern American West, environmental history, and tourism. He is also the author of Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement, winner of the International Ski History Association's 2013 Ullr Award.

Links:

• Michael W. Childers, The Mountains Are Calling: Tourists and the Unmaking of Yosemite National Park (University of Nebraska Press, 2026)

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