America's Forgotten History. Part 3: A Progressive Empire

Part Three of America's Forgotten History takes us from the end of the Civil War to the Spanish-American War and the Philippine Insurection. We look at Reconstruction, the Indian Wars in the West, the land grant railroads of the West, the labor and farmer movements, the rise of Populism and Progressivism, Jim Crow laws and the freedmen after Reconstruction, the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism, and finally America joining Europe and Japan in the pursuit of empire. 1898, the year it became an explicit and unabashed empire, was a great if largely ignored turning point in American history, pointing America forever in a different direction. The perspective of this series is libertarian or classical liberal; the hope is that it is a good story sympathetic to all sides.