Published on December 10, 2025 (Episode 436)
Introduction
The red-flowered plant that appears everywhere at this time of year—there was a veritable forest of them in Wegmans this morning—is known in Mexico as the cuetlaxochitl, or the noche buena. Americans, however, know it by the name of the man who introduced it to the United States: Poinsettia.
Joel Roberts Poinsett was a far more complicated organism than the plant that bears his name. He was a South Carolinian who spent years away from his native state; a committed nationalist and firm opponent of nullification; a world traveler at a time when few Americans went abroad; a slaveowner who other slaveowners regarded as suspiciously anti-slavery; an international investor who also devoted himself to South Carolina’s local improvements; a diplomat who spent decades trying—usually unsuccessfully—to become a soldier. And even that list leaves out more than it includes. As my guest Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has put it, “He was not the same, anywhere.”
About the Guest
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele is Professor of History at Miami University of Ohio. She is the author of Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 and Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism. Her research focuses on the intersections of political economy, state formation, and American identity in the early republic.
For Further Investigation
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Flowers, Guns, and Money: Joel Roberts Poinsett and the Paradoxes of American Patriotism (University of Chicago Press, 2024)
—, Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 (Hopkins, 2019)
Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (Oxford University Press, 2011)
Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Related Episodes
Founding Scoundrels—unsavory American founders and their scams, grifts, and cons
Forming National Character—on the importance of foreign policy for forming the national identity of the early American Republic
True Blue—about Southerners from the deep South who fought for the Union, and why they did it
Reflection Questions
What does Poinsett’s life reveal about the contradictory nature of early American nationalism?
How did his experiences abroad shape his ideas about the United States?
Why might Poinsett have inspired both admiration and suspicion among his contemporaries?
Tags: Poinsett; Lindsay Schakenbach Regele; Early Republic; Diplomacy; U.S.–Mexico; Political Economy; Historically Thinking
