GEOFF BENNETT: An historian and a journalist go on a road trip.

No, it's not the start of a joke.

It's what Judy Woodruff did this summer with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Beverly Gage.

For her latest book, Gage traveled across the country, exploring the people, places, and turning points that have shaped America over its 250 year history.

And Judy joined her for part of that journey, starting in Chicago.

It's part of her series Crossroads: America at 250.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Elaborate tile work, Edison lightbulbs, carved woodwork, gleaming silver.

The table is quite something.

LISA KEY, Executive Director, Driehaus Museum: For you and your 10 best friends to have dinner together.

At that time, you would have been served things like turtle soup or angels on horseback.

Those were the types of food delicacies.

BEVERLY GAGE, Author, "This Land is Your Land": Which is what?

JUDY WOODRUFF: What is that?

WOMAN: Oysters.

JUDY WOODRUFF: These are the trappings of wealth of the Nickerson family, who lived here in the late 1800s and helped make Chicago what it is today.

Now the Driehaus Museum, director Lisa Key watches over it all and showed historian Beverly Gage and me around.

LISA KEY: I liken this house and what this room tells you about the family to sort of someone's social media feed today.

It's a curated way to present their values and how they think about the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Gage first toured the Driehaus Museum and almost 300 other sites around the country when she was researching her book "This Land is Your Land," an historical travel log covering 250 years of America's past.

One of her chapters begins in Chicago, a city that became a symbol for the Gilded Age, when industrialization created eye-popping fortunes virtually overnight.

BEVERLY GAGE: The big story of the Gilded Age is not only about these new concentrations of wealth, but the concentrations of power that that produced.

And one of the big questions of the Gilded Age and the progressive era was, could you run a democracy, could this country survive as a republic when you were going to have these concentrations of wealth and power?

That was front and center in almost every set of political debates during the age.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It changed everybody's circumstances.

Yes, there was this layer of great wealth.

That had an effect on all of society, didn't it?

BEVERLY GAGE: Right.

In cities like Chicago, you began to have new cultural institutions that were being funded by the wealthiest Americans, often kind of high art, classical music, public libraries, sometimes as monuments to themselves.

But another piece of what happened was that you began to have movements saying that this is not the way the world ought to operate.

We don't want these concentrations of power.

These concentrations of wealth are unjust.

And so you began to have huge conflicts between an mostly immigrant working class in a place like Chicago and the people that they saw as their bosses.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Twenty minutes' drive south along the shore of Lake Michigan, Gage took us to another relic.

Today, it's the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry.

But, in 1893, it was one of the smaller buildings that made up the World's Fair that drew 27 million visitors from around the world.

BEVERLY GAGE: This was the Palace of Fine Arts.

And if you look at it, you can see the scale of ambition.

And it was home to all sorts of extraordinary statuary and paintings and art from around the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: And you can see some of that even from the outside of it.

BEVERLY GAGE: That's right.

You get a sense of the spirit of the fair, right, this classical statuary, the columns.

It was intended to sort of say, hey, look, Chicago, we're like ancient Rome.

We're like ancient Athens.

We are going to be one of the great cities of the world.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Look at us.

BEVERLY GAGE: Exactly.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But, as Gage told us, along with that greatness came problems that would go on to have lasting impact.

BEVERLY GAGE: People start to look to a place like Chicago and say, that's the future.

That's the future of America.

But then that's the future of modern civilization.

It's going to be places like Chicago, new, energetic, fast-growing industrial cities that are something that's almost entirely new in the world.

They're also looking to Chicago to say, wow, the problems that are emerging in Chicago, class conflict, poor housing, pollution, homelessness, employment insecurity, those are going to be the problems that are going to really define modern society.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Nowhere was one of those problems, class conflict, on greater display than in Pullman, Chicago, where luxury railcars by the same name were manufactured.

RODERICK LEWIS, Pullman House Project: This is one of the executive houses here in Pullman.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Roderick Lewis leads tours around the historic neighborhood that was the nation's first planned industrial company town.

BEVERLY GAGE: And is it true, as you go in the direction that we're going, the houses begin to get smaller and smaller as you head into workers territory?

RODERICK LEWIS: Yes, certainly.

It's very hierarchical here.

So, on the 111th Street at the executive house row there, on executive row, you find the executives.

Further down, heading south here, you will find the workers' houses.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Today, you would never guess Pullman was the site of a landmark workers strike in 1894 that forced a nationwide railroad boycott and violent labor conflict, all triggered by wage cuts and high company town rents.

RODERICK LEWIS: So the strike went from May 11, pretty much, to the middle of July, unsuccessfully, because President Grover Cleveland involved the National Guard, nationalized the local Guard here and broke the strike.

JUDY WOODRUFF: It was an important moment in labor relations in the United States.

RODERICK LEWIS: It's a huge moment because it proved that the federal government could step in and actually, through its power and authority, end up breaking strikes and things and using that power against the individual worker.

(BELL RINGING) JUDY WOODRUFF: Car number 1518 bell.

ALFONSO QUIROZ, Former Pullman Employee: Yes.

JUDY WOODRUFF: We met up with 90-year-old Alfonso Quiroz, who's the last Pullman worker to still live in the community.

He's worked hard to preserve its legacy, saving papers and artifacts from the dustbin of history.

Why have you stayed here?

ALFONSO QUIROZ: Because I was part of Pullman, part of me.

I just love Pullman.

I was born in Pullman.

I'm thinking my last days of my life will probably be in Pullman.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, Beverly, here we are driving through North Central Indiana.

We have left Chicago.

We're on our way to Terre Haute.

BEVERLY GAGE: Well, we were in Pullman.

And one of the biggest characters in that conflict was a man named Eugene Debs, who is from Terre Haute, and we're heading south to see his home there.

Debs was this sort of ordinary American kid from Indiana.

He came up with the idea to build one big railroad union for all the rail workers in the country.

He called it the American Railway Union.

It is one of the things that helped to make the Pullman strike not just this little local conflict, but a big national conflict.

Debs ended up in jail as a result of the Pullman strike, but he was sort of radicalized by that experience, and he went on to become one of the great figures of early 20th century American socialism.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The country's hotbed of radicalism in the early 20th century was centered in this two-story frame house, the home of Eugene Debs, the union organizer who later ran for president of the United States five times as a Socialist.

BEVERLY GAGE: Hello.

ALLISON DUERK, Director, Eugene V. Debs Museum: Hello.

Welcome.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Allison Duerk showed us around his museum.

ALLISON DUERK: So much of what Debs spoke about and wrote about and organized for in his time are struggles that are not said and done today, even just from a life-and-death safety perspective, or these issues of wars that we might not have a say in declaring, or immigration, or speech, or who our economy is designed to serve and who's benefiting from our labor at the end of the day.

I think these are still fundamental questions about our role in this world today too.

JUDY WOODRUFF: So, the ideas that Debs fought for, you're saying, are still out there and unresolved today.

ALLISON DUERK: Absolutely.

There is a real appetite in Debs' time and today for big transformative change, radical changes, even, to really get to the core of some of the problems that we're looking at.

BEVERLY GAGE: It's often said that we live in a second Gilded Age.

If you look at the statistics on the American labor movement, we look a lot like what the numbers looked like in the Gilded Age.

But in the middle of the 20th century, you really had a moment of significant labor power.

That has been falling away ever since.

So, in the 21st century, it's almost as if on these issues we have erased a lot of the 20th century and just gone back to the late 19th.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Back in Pullman, now a national historical park, trains still roll in and out, while many of the questions about wealth, work, and power remain.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Judy Woodruff in Chicago and Terre Haute, Indiana.