Gilded Age
Period in United States history from about the late 1870s to the late 1890s, between the Reconstruction era and the Progressive Era, named by 1920s historians after Mark Twain's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. It was a time of rapid economic growth and industrialization: real wages rose 40 percent from 1860 to 1890, millions of European immigrants arrived, and railroads boomed, while inequality deepened as a few 'robber barons' amassed vast wealth amid urban slums and rampant political corruption. The era was interrupted by the Panics of 1873 and 1893 and gave rise to labor unions, political machines, and the reforms of the Progressive Era.
