"The past is another country; they do things differently there."
Inward Empire explores the role of ideas and ideology in American history -- how the surface of actions and events can be shaped by undercurrents of thought and belief. Accessible and thoroughly researched, each episode is a window into a world that is both profoundly foreign and strikingly similar to our own.
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Something strange happened in America at the turn of the 20th century: a society based on individualism began to celebrate identical, replicable people. This episode tells the story of two men who drove this profound change in American culture. One was a business consultant named Frederick Winslow Taylor. The other was an artist named Charles Dana Gibson. Each created an identical human being, a replicant who would serve the needs of the economy. Taylor's replicant was Schmidt, a worker who coul...
In 1968, Jerry Rubin was sure that the baby boomers were the vanguard of a second American Revolution. A leader of the countercultural Yippies, he pioneered a new kind of absurdist political theater aimed at turning the young against the establishment: exorcising evil spirits from the Pentagon, throwing blood at ambassadors, and nominating a pig for president. But by 1980, Rubin had morphed into a New Age yuppie who believed that health foods, inner well-being, and the power of money would save ...
In November 1963, a faction of South Vietnamese generals overthrew and assassinated Ngo Dinh Diem with the support of the Kennedy administration. In the final part of this series, we'll explore how infighting, ambition, and miscommunication sealed the fate of the Diem Experiment and set South Vietnam on the path to disaster.
After destroying his rivals in the Battle of Saigon, President Diem sets out to build a new nation in South Vietnam. On the one hand he offers land reform and a glittering new middle class, built on a tide of American aid. On the other hand is a ruthless anti-communist campaign of denunciations, torture, and re-education camps. A sprawling cast of characters comes together in this complex chapter: Saigon oligarchs, French philosophers, American New Dealers, landlords, peasants, Viet Cong guerill...
In the 1950s, most Americans viewed the Cold War as a battle between freedom and tyranny. There was just one problem: how to explain alliances with anti-communist authoritarians like Ngo Dinh Diem. In this episode, we'll explore how American politicians, lobbyists, and one very enterprising Navy doctor imagined the new Republic of Vietnam as a bastion of democracy and freedom led by "a mandarin in a sharkskin suit who's upsetting the Red timetable."
Back in Saigon in 1954, Ngo Dinh Diem becomes premier of a country shattered by war and partition. With reunification elections looming, Diem barely controls the grounds of his own palace. Hostile Frenchmen, religious militias, a crime syndicate, ex-emperor Bao Dai, and Diem's own military conspire to end his rule before it can begin. Baffled American diplomats do political triage to avert a coup, urging Diem to bring his rivals to the table. But the new premier has other plans...
For nine years at the height of the Cold War, America's global crusade against communism rested on the shoulders of Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem. Hailed as a "miracle man" who brought the blessings of democracy and development to South Vietnam, Diem became a celebrity. But his miracles had a steep price. As his regime soaked up millions of dollars in American aid and military support, it ruthlessly suppressed its enemies, devastated villages, and failed to cope with a rising communist insurge...
After sending the Molly Maguires to the scaffold in 1877, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency plunged headlong into America's labor conflict. At the vanguard of its war on organized labor was the Protective Patrol, an armed force that deployed to over seventy major strikes. Was the Patrol a lawkeeping elite, as the Agency and its employers claimed? Or, as labor leaders and reformers argued, was it a gang of cold-blooded, mercenary killers? After a disastrous intervention in 1892, testimony in ...
Pinkerton's National Detective Agency was 19th-century America's premier private police force, the leader of a flourishing industry that offered solutions to the chaos and corruption of the nation's law enforcement. But the Pinkertons were more than just detectives. By the 1890s, they were a private army-on-call for powerful corporations. In the first episode of this two-part series, we'll chart the birth and evolution of the Agency -- from its founding by a radical immigrant in the 1850s to its...
In a country as big and diverse as America, stories are crucially important to our sense of common identity. But where do those stories come from, and who creates them? In this episode, we examine the work of writer Owen Wister, who gave Americans one of the touchstones of our common culture: the cowboy. But beneath the familiar surface of this legendary figure lies a complex web of dark and unexpected ideas. By exploring "The Evolution of the Cow-Puncher," an essay written at the height of the ...
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,...
This episode explores the turbulent year of 1877 in the United States, drawing parallels with the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune. It details the economic crisis of 1873, the rise of unregulated corporate power, and the fading faith in the American system. The narrative highlights the harsh conditions faced by industrial workers, particularly in the railroad industry, leading to widespread discontent and the spontaneous outbreak of the Great Strike of 1877, a pivotal moment of class conflict.
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 s...
Ambrose Bierce was a Civil War veteran and the author of the most visceral and unsettling fiction to come out of the most violent conflict in American history. A man out of step with his own time, he insisted on bringing Americans face-to-face with the harsh realities not just of war, but politics, religion, marriage, family, business, and corruption. Hated by many, loved by virtually no one, Bierce hacked and slashed his way through a popular culture drenched in sentimentality and patriotism. I...
Forty years after the Pequot War, a new conflict threatens to tear New England apart. Decades of uneasy coexistence between Puritan colonists and native Algonquians are about to come to a bloody end. King Philip's War will become one of the most destructive wars in American history, a total war shaped by religious ideology and cultural differences. From its beginnings in 1675 through the present, it will be a "report written in blood," each generation searching for a deeper meaning in the destru...
The year is 1620. It is a time of upheaval and apocalyptic fears in England. In the midst of economic disaster, poverty, crime, and ever-worsening religious and political repression, a fundamentalist movement called Puritanism dreams of spiritual and national regeneration. A splinter group of Separatists transplants itself to the shores and forests of New England. They believe they have a God-given mission to redeem themselves, and mankind; they believe the cost of failure will be annihilation. ...
Feb 10, 2015•2 hr 45 min
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