Weird History
Most Extreme Excesses In The Gilded Age
2022 • E38 Mar 30, 2022 11m
Rich families of the Gilded Age lived lives nearly unimaginable today. How so? One need only look around one's hometown and see where the enormous, glorious mansions of the late 19th century have either been turned into private or public museums – or are peeling and rotting away – to get a glimpse. In most cases, it is simply too costly to maintain them as private residences anymore. So, imagine just how incredibly rich the handful of mid- to late 19th-century families had to be to keep up such lavish appearances. The Gilded Age wealth disparity was so extreme that people today often compare them to what modern society terms the "one-percent" class.