A Wonderful Career in Crime (Guest: Frank W. Garmon Jr.)
Ill Literacy: Books with Benson · Tim Benson
Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (2.gum.fm) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.
Show Notes
Heartland’s Tim Benson is joined by Frank W. Garmon Jr., assistant professor of American studies at Christopher Newport University, to discuss his new book, A Wonderful Career in Crime: Charles Cowlam’s Masquerades in the Civil War Era and Gilded Age. They chat Cowlam’s career as convict, spy, detective, congressional candidate, adventurer, con artist, and serial bigamist and how his life managed to intersect with Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Ulysses S. Grant. They also discuss the mid-19th Century’s economic system that was dependent upon trust and personal relationships and how Cowlam exposed the liabilities of the political system constructed on the same foundations.
Get the book here:
https://lsupress.org/9780807182666/a-wonderful-career-in-crime/