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Step into the absurd world of America’s Gilded Age, where fortunes built on railroads, oil, and steel were flaunted in the most spectacularly wasteful ways imaginable. From Newport “cottages” larger than Versailles to masquerade balls lit by thousands of gas flames, the wealthy turned every corner of life into a performance of extravagance. Pets wore diamond collars while immigrant families lived in overcrowded tenements a few blocks away. Banquet tables sagged under towers of oysters that rotted before anyone touched them, and scandals were whispered through society even as opera houses and libraries bore the names of robber barons. This was an age gilded, not golden — a thin sheet of brilliance laid over coal dust, hunger, and strikes broken by Pinkertons.

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