THE GILDED AGE

OLLI of Greater Birmingham presents The Gilded Age with instructor: James Day, Professor of History, University of Montevallo.

The Gilded Age in US history, from the 1870s to about 1900, is a term that came into use in the 1920s and 1930s derived from Mark Twain’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious problems masked by a thin gold gilding. Its beginning overlaps the Reconstruction Era (which ended in 1877), and it is generally thought to be followed by the Progressive Era in the 1890s. It was an era of rapid economic growth, and railroads were the major growth industry. The dominant issues were cultural (especially prohibition, education, and ethnic or racial groups) and economic (tariffs and money supply). With rapid growth of cities, political machines increasingly took control of urban politics.