Ep. 43 - Separate and Elite Society in THE GILDED AGE
HBO’s THE GILDED AGE (Season 2) - Ada Brook (Cynthia Nixon) and Agnes van Rhijn (Christine Baranski); Dorothy Scott (Audra McDonald) and Peggy Scott (Denée Benton); Bertha Russell (Carrie Coon) and Ward McAllister (Nathan Lane). Photos: Warner Media
In episode 43 we’re thrilled to welcome back to the podcast CARLA L. PETERSON, author of the 2011 book Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City. Carla’s book served as a resource for the creation of the characters, story, and the Black community in HBO’s THE GILDED AGE now in its second season.
In this podcast Carla takes us inside the parties, pleasures, and fashionable lifestyles of New York's Black middle class of the 19th century, and talks about how the philsophy of "taste" informed the lives of that century's Black American elite. We also talk about how the separate and elite lives of 19th century New York “old money” represented by the van Rijns, “new money” in the Russell family, and the Black elite portrayed by the Scott family are interpreted for THE GILDED AGE.
…She’s (Peggy) the one young person…in the Black community in THE GILDED AGE. And she is shown to be devoting herself to a life of obligation and duty and not exhibiting pleasure. So the point in writing “Black Gotham” was indeed to show that Black people, the Black elite — that Blacks did experience pleasure.
Carla L. Peterson, author, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
Guest: CARLA L. PETERSON
Carla L. Peterson is professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a specialist in nineteenth-century African American literary and cultural studies.
Black Gotham: : A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City is Carla Peterson's riveting account of her quest to reconstruct the lives of her nineteenth-century ancestors who were both Black Manhattanites and Black Brooklynites. As she shares their stories and those of their friends, neighbors, and business associates, she illuminates the greater history of African-American elites in New York City. (Source: Yale University Press)
In addition to Black Gotham (published in 2011) Carla has published numerous essays and a second book Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830-1880 (1995). For Black Gotham Peterson has appeared on C-SPAN Book TV, wrote for the New York Times Online Disunion Project as well as its City Room page. And recently Carla was a featured speaker at the New York Historical Society.
Carla L. Peterson is currently at work on a new project, Urbanity and Taste: The Making of African American Modernity in Antebellum New York and Philadelphia.
BLACK GOTHAM: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City
“Carla Peterson travels the well known streets of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to uncover the rich and hidden history of New York's black elite in the nineteenth century. That the book arose from her research into her own family history reminds us that in all of our families lies the story of this country.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University
Purchase Black Gotham and other book titles related to this and past podcasts on the MBGLtd affiliate page on bookshop.org. Your book purchases support independent booksellers and a small commission supports Historical Drama with The Boston Sisters.
THE GILDED AGE Season 2
HBO’s THE GILDED AGE Season 2 trailer
Created and written by Julian Fellowes (DOWNTON ABBEY), THE GILDED AGE is set in the year 1882 in New York City. The series dramatizes the tensions between old money New York Society and the new money of the industrial barons who rose to power after the Civil War. Season 1 premiered in January 2022.
In Season 2 of THE GILDED AGE, Bertha Russell inches toward a leading role in society, Marian Brook starts teaching, Ada Brook begins a new courtship, and Peggy Scott taps into her activist spirit. (Source: Warner Media)
Black Gotham and the Black Elite
THE EDUCATION OF PEGGY SCOTT
Denée Benton as Peggy Scott (left). Sarah Mapps Douglass (right), educator, abolitionist, writer, and public lecturer
If Peggy [Scott] went to ICU, the Institute for Colored Youth, which is what she says, the head of the female department, up until the 1870s…was Sarah Mapps Douglass. And she [Douglass] was from a very eminent Philadelphia family whose parents and her parents circle had all been invested in education….She would have been Peggy Scott’s teacher.
Carla L. Peterson
THE REAL ARTHUR SCOTT
Carla L. Peterson’s great grandfather, Philip Augustus White (left photo), is the inspiration for the character Arthur Scott (John Douglas Thompson) in THE GILDED AGE. Philip Augustus White opened his own drug store in lower Manhattan in 1847. Philip Augustus was born free, unlike the character Arthur Scott who was born enslaved and freed when the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect January 1, 1863.