#i'm still fairly early into my history deep dive so i unfortunately don't have much more to recommend

[fictionadventurer]

Hellooo I am wondering do you have any good book recs or resources for if I want to learn about the progressive era or some of the lesser known presidents (Garfield Arthur McKinley etc?) I love your posts and I’ve been hankering for a while to know more and immerse myself in those time periods that aren’t Revolution Civil War or WW1 onward! :D

Naturally, I'm recommending the Presidential podcast to anyone who wants to learn more about the broader scope of American history. Going through history president by president means that you don't skip over any of the in-between stuff, and since you learn about each of these presidents as people, you get a very personal look at history. Each episode is about forty minutes long, so there's not much time commitment, and most episodes involve interviews with people who wrote books, so you have reading recommendations if you come across a president that you want to learn more about.

For Garfield and Arthur, I can recommend Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President by Candice Millard. It's not the most scholarly book, but it's a very engagingly-written account of Garfield's life and death and all the history surrounding his story.

For the progressive era, I'm going to suggest The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt and the Golden Age of Journalism by Doris Kearns Goodwin. I haven't actually read this one, but the couple of chapters I read on the Kindle preview were interesting, and Team of Rivals was fantastic, and since you specifically asked about the progressive era, I figure this is a safe enough book to suggest. It's actually about the friendship between Roosevelt and William Howard Taft (who is another fascinating forgotten president) and how their very different personalities brought them together and eventually tore them apart, as well as about how TR used the press to further his agenda, which seems like an interesting angle to take on the era.

(Oh, and this goes in a completely different direction, but for a book set roughly around that same time period, The Food Explorer by Daniel Stone is about the hunt to find new foods for American agriculture, and is full of fascinating history about how this all interacts with the events around the turn of the 20th century.)

Another podcast I can recommend is American History Tellers. I listened to their seven-episode arc about Andrew Jackson, and it's an immersive and engaging dive into American history from about the War of 1812 until Jackson's death in 1845, going pretty deep into an era of history that's usually glossed over.