Just this past year, President Obama announced that the Alaskan mountain, named after

McKinley, Mount McKinley, would be renamed Denali.

It's original native American name.

And not really, as we've seen in the case of some other monuments, some memorials, not

really because of any failings or controversies that had come to light about President McKinley.

But just really because it had seemed inappropriate and insensitive to many in the first place,

that we had written over a part of Alaskan's heritage to commemorate a president from Ohio

who had no connection to this mountain and who had never even seen Alaska.

So today there is no more Mount McKinley and there are very few other cultural non-stim

McKinley today either.

So other than his assassination, what else is a presidential podcast episode on McKinley

supposed to focus on?

Well, you're going to find out.

I'm Lilian Kenningham and this is the 24th episode of presidential.

There are actually quite a few directions that I thought about taking this McKinley episode

in.

We could have looked at the rise of American imperialism, which would have been really interesting

by talking about the Spanish-American war.

McKinley had reluctantly entered that war and in it the US helped free Cuba from Spanish

rule and the US also ended up gaining control over Guam, Puerto Rico and bought the Philippines.

So there's that.

I also thought about potentially digging really deeply into the debates over the gold standard.

...