Gilded Age

The Gilded Age is a time in the in history of the United States. It lasted from the end of the American Civil War up to the late 19th century. It happens at the same time as the latter part of the British Victorian era.

The name "Gilded Age" was first used by writer Mark Twain in The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The time saw rapid progress in technology, railroad growth, and industrialization.^[1] Immigrants came in the millions. The strong political divisions in that time were arguments over currency, tariffs, political corruption and patronage, railroads, and business trusts.^[2]

Gilded Age Media

First edition cover of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873), a collaborative novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
The celebration of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad, May 10, 1869
The Toluca Street Oil Field in Los Angeles oil district, 1900
Grand Central Depot in New York City, opened in 1871
Sacramento Railroad Station in 1874
Cornelius Vanderbilt versus James Fisk Jr. in a famous rivalry with the Erie Railroad
The Oswego starch factory in Oswego, New York, 1876
Scottish immigrant Andrew Carnegie led the enormous expansion of the American steel industry.
An octopus representing Standard Oil with tentacles wrapped around Congress and state capitals, as well as the steel, copper, and shipping industries, and reaching for the White House. 1904 cartoon by Udo Keppler.
An 1883 Puck magazine cartoon showing Cyrus Field, Jay Gould, William H. Vanderbilt, and Russell Sage, protected from a sea of "hard times" by an island of personal wealth and low wages that is supported on the backs of workers