English transcript

The Gilded Age gets its name from a book written

by Mark Twain called The Gilded Age: A Tale

of Today. It refers to the period of time in

American history stretching from the 1870s to

the turn of the century, around 1900. Now, "gilded"

is not the same thing as "golden." Something

that is gilded has a very thin layer

of gold on the outside,

but underneath, it could be something cheap

or rotten. And that was Twain's point: that

on the surface, the United States looked wealthy,

it looked powerful, it was industrializing rapidly,

but underneath, there was poverty, corruption,

and inequality.