The Gilded Age in America is the subject of my new research project, which began in the last year or so but which I'm returning to with increased energy. The goal is at least one book. This website is a more-or less realtime "screenshot" of my research, which I'm organizing in Obsidian. There are a lot of sources that are contributing data to this. I'll add a bibliography soon. Some of these sources are more "reputable" than others. I'm interested in the ways the current Gilded Age echoes the previous one, a hundred years ago, and one of these is that the types of journalist-historians that were once derided as muckrakers are active again. While I don't blindly believe anything I read, I do appreciate people who are willing to challenge the "master narratives" that support status quos -- especially when they do and document their own research.
The point of doing this research in a tool like Obsidian is that to a large extent I think the Gilded Ages are about networks of elites and the ways they interact, communicate, and support or undermine each other. Some of the people and organizations I'm looking into are in business. Others are in government. Some are inheritors of generational wealth (I call them plutocrats). Some are criminals. Often there's overlap. And I suspect there will be interesting connections that will reveal themselves in the graph which appears on each page, which you can either expand (arrow icon in top right of graph) or shift to the global graph (network icon). I'm personally expecting to gain insights and hopefully to be surprised as I add more notes, which I'll be doing on an ongoing basis and reporting on more or less weekly.
The vault is read-only and you can reach it for free at https://publish.obsidian.md/gildedage If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please let me know. Happy browsing! --Dan
My Gilded Age Vault