Today I’m fighting a cold I caught on the plane back from Iceland, so I’m feeling a bit low energy. I'm going to begin with easy work. Research on my Gilded Age sources. I did a bit of work last semester, when I could steal some time, beginning a network of characters (both people and companies) that might appear in a history of the American ruling class. I did things like examine the Ward McAllister list of the "400" of New York Society. I also started to map out all the names and familial connections mentioned by Ferdinand Lundberg in the early chapters of America's 60 Families (started, there’s a lot left to do!). And the companies listed in the Pujo Committee’s “Affiliations” list.
I had tried to do this work using the new note-making app I was excited about, Scrintal. I have since then decided to shift back to Obsidian, so the first step of this project for me this summer was to move the info I had entered into Scrintal over to my Obsidian vault. Why did I choose to return to Obsidian? I still like the "card-like" user interface that Scrintal provides. But it is SLOW, especially as the file sizes grow. The data I enter goes to a server in the European Union, so anything I do with this board takes time. And I don't control the data. I like owning the file this info goes to. It’s still in the cloud, but it’s on a Dropbox or iCloud instance I control.
So I took the time today to copy and paste the info I had collected from a variety of sources into a "Gilded Age" subfolder of my Obsidian vault, which I can open as a separate vault by selecting the folder. When I do this, using the info I’ve just migrated to this vault, I get a graph that looks like this. When I check to see where the most connections are, what do I find? No surprise. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Sorry, Dan about your cold; guess should still wear a mask on airplanes, at least, in airports? Sorry too about giving up on Scrintal, although I have agreed with your concerns, and they still haven't opened a free membership, so I haven't tried it. As to your current research, I think you might be interested in [Amazon.com: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else eBook : Freeland, Chrystia: Kindle Store](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007V65OQG), particularly checking out this quote from there:
> On February 10, 1897, seven hundred members of America’s super-elite gathered at the Waldorf Hotel for a costume ball hosted by Bradley Martin, a New York lawyer, and his wife, Cornelia. The New York Times reported that the most popular costume for women was Marie Antoinette—the choice of fifty ladies. Cornelia, a plump matron with blue eyes, a bow mouth, a generous bosom, and incipient jowls, dressed as Mary Stuart, but bested them all by wearing a necklace once owned by the French queen. Bradley came as Louis XIV—the Sun King himself. John Jacob Astor was Henry of Navarre. His mother, Caroline, was one of the Marie Antoinettes, in a gown adorned with $250,000 worth of jewels. J. P. Morgan dressed as Molière; his niece, Miss Pierpont Morgan, came as Queen Louise of Prussia.
Freeland, Chrystia (2012-10-10T23:58:59.000). Plutocrats . Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
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