The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age in American history was the modern United States' formative period. It was an exciting, exuberant, innovative, progressive, glittering era in which America was in the process of becoming a world power. But the Gilded Age was also an era of greed, guile, corruption, poverty, and inequality. Learn about the rise of America to global status, about the American artists of the period and their work, about the nation's urbanization and industrialization, about the new American millionaires, and about why Mark Twain called the era "gilded" rather than "golden."