If someone tells you they love Grover Cleveland, do not go with them to a second location. Welcome to the first Future History episode of Landline, where I ask some tough questions about how history will remember us. If future historians had only our music, movies, TV, and celebrity gossip to go on, could they understand life today? What stories would they tell about us? First up: the Season 4 premiere of The Gilded Age. It’s 1886, and everyone is panicking about the order of things. Oscar and Enid’s lavender marriage gives me hope for less gay trauma this season. Gladys’s traumatic birth opens a look at Victorian obstetrics and maternal health today. Peggy calls out Cleveland’s record on Reconstruction, and George spirals over railroad rebates and Rockefeller. Then I zoom out to what the show says about 2026: the limits of straight marriage, the second Gilded Age and Martha Stewart’s Halloween costume. Plus, what do The Gilded Age and The Real Housewives of Potomac have in common? Is predicting the future harder than reading the chemistry between Marian and Larry? 100%.
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Timestamps
- 00:00 A warning about Grover Cleveland
- 01:00 What is Future History?
- 02:00 Oscar and Enid’s lavender wedding
- 06:00 Webster Hall and queer New York in 1886
- 10:00 Gladys’s childbirth and the save-the-duchess scene
- 16:00 Chloroform, Lister and maternal health, then and now
- 24:00 Marian and Larry’s night at the hotel
- 30:00 Peggy, the Kirklands and the Black elite
- 34:00 Agnes, Ada and the case against Grover Cleveland
- 44:00 George, Rockefeller and railroad rebates, with a clock twink chaser, followed by what historians will make of 2026
Transcript
Full episode transcript here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JflkDhoz9ZJfB0IeXCYFqKsJrNJe6sBpruxGwIACbqU/edit?usp=sharing
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