Download or read book Top Drawer American High Society from the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties written by Mary Cable and published by New Word City. This book was released on 2018-01-19 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age of high society in the United States was remarkably brief but also glorious. The names of the families of "people-we-know" - from Astor to Vanderbilt, McCormick to Palmer, Cabot to Whitney - and the places they called home - Fifth Avenue, Newport, Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Prairie Avenue in Chicago, Delmonico's ballroom - still evoke glittering images of style, wealth, and often-outrageous show. The era of "The 400," with all its glamour gentility, and pretension, is marvelously evoked in this book. Top Drawer is affectionate and ironic by turns, pointing out, for example, that the American elite were the greatest art patrons since the Renaissance, yet recounting scandals and foibles with a knowing eye that never loses sight of the ruthless quest for power that underlay the gilded surface. "The hoi polloi get their own back at the hoity-toity in Top Drawer, Mary Cable's witty social history of the Gilded age of Astors, Vanderbilts, Van Rensselaers, Havemeyers, Chatfield-Taylors, et al. A stylish performance . . . . Cable's polished prose, cool wit, and extensive research make illuminating history and grand entertainment." - Publishers Weekly

Download or read book Framing Class written by Diana Elizabeth Kendall and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2011 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Class action in the media -- Twenty-four-karat gold frames : lifestyles of the rich and famous -- Gilded cages : media stories of how the mighty have fallen -- Fragile frames : the poor and homeless -- Tarnished metal frames : the working class and the working poor -- Splintered wooden frames : the middle class -- Framing class, vicarious living, and conspicuous consumption.

Download or read book Twenty first century Perspectives on Nineteenth century Art written by Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 2008 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book presents an interdisciplinary and inclusive view of nineteenth-century art, observed from the vantage point of the new twenty-first century. The areas of expertise represented by the thirty essays herein span the full range of nineteenth-century studies, and include discussions of such artistic styles as realism, impressionism, romanticism, and art nouveau, as well as early twentieth-century movements that owe their formative influence to the nineteenth century. Topics span the historical gamut from revivalism to the roots of modernism, considering along the way such themes as the depiction of women, Orientalism, art criticism, evolutionary theory, political propaganda, history painting, landscape, and national identity. Aspects of art display, public monuments, and international exhibitions shed light on the roles of government and individuals in the dissemination of artistic styles and subject matter. Unique in this collection is an emphasis on the marketing of art, both in America and abroad, which considers the important financial and commercial issues that continue to influence viewers' beliefs and perceptions. Most important, this book demonstrates that the rich field of nineteenth-century studies continues to inspire discovery and creativity."--Publisher description.

Download or read book Mrs Astor s New York written by Eric Homberger and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-01 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mrs Astor, queen of New York society in the decades before World War I, used her prestige to create a social aristocracy in the city. Mrs Astor's story, told here by Eric Homberger, sheds light on the origins, extravagant lifestyle, and social competitiveness of this aristocracy.

Download or read book Leisure Plantations and the Making of a New South written by Julia Brock and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2015-10-01 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leisure, Plantations, and the Making of New South investigates the social, architectural, and environmental history of sporting plantations in the South Carolina lowcountry and the Red Hills region of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. Although plantations figure prominently in histories of the post-emancipation South, historians have paid little attention to the redevelopment of plantations for non-agricultural use. By examining the two largest concentrations of sporting plantations on the south Atlantic coast, this collection explores questions about historical memory of slavery, race relations, material culture, and the environment during the first half of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Church and Estate written by Thomas F. Rzeznik and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Church and Estate, Thomas Rzeznik examines the lives and religious commitments of the Philadelphia elite during the period of industrial prosperity that extended from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s. The book demonstrates how their religious beliefs informed their actions and shaped their class identity, while simultaneously revealing the ways in which financial influences shaped the character of American religious life. In tracing those connections, it shows how religion and wealth shared a fruitful, yet ultimately tenuous, relationship.

Download or read book After the Ball written by Patricia Beard and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2021-06-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in 1905, against a backdrop of magnificence, excess and corrupting glamour, After the Ball's themes are stunningly fresh: greed and chicanery, flawed love between fathers and sons, and contradictory American attitudes about wealth. Glamorous, cultured and ambitious - but fatally young and naïve - James Hazen Hyde was twenty-three when he inherited the majority shares in the billion-dollar Equitable Life Assurance Society in 1899. Five years later, at the pinnacle of social and financial success, he made a fatal miscalculation, and set in motion the first great Wall Street scandal of the twentieth century. On the last night of January 1905, Hyde gave one of the most fabulous balls of the Gilded Age. Falsely accused of charging the party to his company, he was sucked into a maelstrom of allegations of corporate malfeasance that involved the era's most famous financiers and industrialists. “Wonderfully foreboding...exactly on pitch...a textured and compelling tragedy”—USA Today

Download or read book A Season of Splendor written by Greg King and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2008-10-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Journey through the splendor and the excesses of the Gilded Age "Every aspect of life in the Gilded Age took on deeper, transcendent meaning intended to prove the greatness of America: residences beautified their surroundings; works of art uplifted and were shared with the public; clothing exhibited evidence of breeding; jewelry testified to cultured taste and wealth; dinners demonstrated sophisticated palates; and balls rivaled those of European courts in their refinement. The message was unmistakable: the United States had arrived culturally, and Caroline Astor and her circle were intent on leading the nation to unimagined heights of glory."—From A Season of Splendor Take a dazzling journey through the Gilded Age, the period from roughly the 1870s to 1914, when bluebloods from older, established families met the nouveau riche headlong—railway barons, steel magnates, and Wall Street speculators—and forged an uneasy and glittering new society in New York City. The best of the best were Caroline Astor's 400 families, and she shaped and ruled this high society with steel. A Season of Splendor is a panoramic sweep across this sumptuous landscape, presenting the families, the wealth, the balls, the clothing, and the mansions in vivid detail—as well as the shocking end of the era with the sinking of the Titanic.

Download or read book The Architecture of Delano Aldrich written by Peter Pennoyer and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2003 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The firm of Delano & Aldrich occupied a central place in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, substantially shaping the architectural climate of the period.

Download or read book Diamonds and Deadlines written by Betsy Prioleau and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Betsy Prioleau’s biography of Gilded Age female tycoon Miriam Leslie is “an appropriately twisty tale of someone trying to outrun her origins. . . . Her story sparkles, as intoxicating as a champagne fountain that somebody else is paying for” (New York Times Book Review). Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For 20 years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity and tastemaker in the process. But Miriam Leslie was also a byword for scandal: she flouted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times, and harbored unsavory secrets that she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. Both during and after her lifetime, glimpses of the truth emerged, including an illegitimate birth and a checkered youth. Diamonds and Deadlines reveals the previously unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “empress of journalism,” who dropped a bombshell at her death: she left her entire multimillion-dollar estate to women’s suffrage—a never-equaled amount that guaranteed passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. In this dazzling biography, cultural historian Betsy Prioleau draws from diaries, genealogies, and published works to provide an intimate look at the life of one of the Gilded Age’s most complex, powerful women and unexpected feminist icons. Ultimately, Diamonds and Deadlines restores Mrs. Frank Leslie to her rightful place in history as a monumental businesswoman who presaged the feminist future and reflected, in bold relief, the Gilded Age, one of the most momentous, seismic, and vivid epochs in American history. Includes Black-and-White Images

Download or read book Property Rites written by Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1925 Leonard Rhinelander, the youngest son of a wealthy New York society family, sued to end his marriage to Alice Jones, a former domestic servant and the daughter of a "colored" cabman. After being married only one month, Rhinelander pressed for the

Download or read book A Parisienne in Chicago written by Madame Léon Grandin and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating account of a French woman's impressions of America in the late nineteenth century reveals an unusual cross-cultural journey through fin de siècle Paris, Chicago, and New York. Madame Leon Grandin's travels and extended stay in Chicago in 1893 were the result of her husband's collaboration on the fountain sculpture for the World's Columbian Exposition. Initially impressed with the city's fast pace and architectural grandeur, Grandin's attentions were soon drawn to its social and cultural customs, reflected as observations in her writing. During a ten-month interval as a resident, she was intrigued by the interactions between men and women, mothers and their children, teachers and students, and other human relationships, especially noting the comparative social freedoms of American women. After this interval of acclimatization, the young Parisian socialite had begun to view her own culture and its less liberated mores with considerable doubt. "I had tasted the fruit of independence, of intelligent activity, and was revolted at the idea of assuming once again the passive and inferior role that awaited me!" she wrote. Grandin's curiosity and interior access to Chicago's social and domestic spaces produced an unusual travel narrative that goes beyond the usual tourist reactions and provides a valuable resource for readers interested in late nineteenth-century America, Chicago, and social commentary. Significantly, her feminine views on American life are in marked contrast to parallel reflections on the culture by male visitors from abroad. It is precisely the dual narrative of this text--the simultaneous recounting of a foreigner's impressions, and the consequent questioning of her own cultural certainties--that make her book unique. This translation includes an introductory essay by Arnold Lewis that situates Grandin's account in the larger context of European visitors to Chicago in the 1890s.

Download or read book Rich Indians written by Alexandra Harmon and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2010-10-25 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long before lucrative tribal casinos sparked controversy, Native Americans amassed other wealth that provoked intense debate about the desirability, morality, and compatibility of Indian and non-Indian economic practices. Alexandra Harmon examines seven such instances of Indian affluence and the dilemmas they presented both for Native Americans and for Euro-Americans--dilemmas rooted in the colonial origins of the modern American economy. Harmon's study not only compels us to look beyond stereotypes of greedy whites and poor Indians, but also convincingly demonstrates that Indians deserve a prominent place in American economic history and in the history of American ideas.

Download or read book Gilded written by Deborah Davis and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2009-09-25 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written history of high society in Newport, Rhode Island, from the acclaimed author of Party of the Century Newport is the legendary and beautiful home of American aristocracy and the sheltered super-rich. Many of the country's most famous blueblood families?the closest thing we have to royalty?have lived and summered in Newport since the nineteenth century. The Astors, the Vanderbilts, Edith Wharton, JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Doris Duke, and Claus and Sunny von Bulow are just a few of the many names who have called the city home. Gilded takes you along as you explore the fascinating heritage of the Newport elite, from its first colonists to the newest of its new millennium millionaires, showing the evolution of a town intent on living in its own world. Through a narrative filled with engrossing characters and lively tales of untold extravagance, Davis brings the resort to life and uncovers the difference between rich and Newport rich along the way. An engrossing multigenerational saga that tells the real story of the rich and famous in Newport Vibrant, praiseworthy writing: "[Davis] brings splendidly colorful behind-the-scenes action and players up front" (the New York Times on Party of the Century) 34 evocative black-and-white photographs Written with insight and dramatic flair, Gilded gives you a rare peek into the cloistered coastal playground of America's moneyed elite.

Download or read book Hollywood Bohemians written by Brett L. Abrams and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1917 and 1941, Hollywood studios, gossip columnists and novelists featured an unprecedented number of homosexuals, cross-dressers, and adulterers in their depictions of the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle. Actress Greta Garbo defined herself as the ultimate serial bachelorette. Screenwriter Mercedes De Acosta engaged in numerous lesbian relationships with the Hollywood elite. And countless homosexual designers brazenly picked up men in the hottest Hollywood nightclubs. Hollywood's image grew as a place of sexual abandon. This book demonstrates how studios and the media used images of these sexually adventurous characters to promote the industry and appeal to the prurient interests of their audiences.

Download or read book Jackie Janet Lee written by J. Randy Taraborrelli and published by St. Martin's Griffin. This book was released on 2019-02-05 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *CURRENTLY BEING DEVELOPED FOR TELEVISION BY TOMORROW STUDIOS* A dazzling biography of three of the most glamorous women of the 20th Century: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, her mother Janet Lee Auchincloss, and her sister, Princess Lee Radziwill. “Do you know what the secret to happily-ever-after is?” Janet Bouvier Auchincloss would ask her daughters Jackie and Lee during their tea time. “Money and Power,” she would say. It was a lesson neither would ever forget. They followed in their mother’s footsteps after her marriages to the philandering socialite “Black Jack” Bouvier and the fabulously rich Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss. Jacqueline Bouvier would marry John F. Kennedy and the story of their marriage is legendary, as is the story of her second marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Less well known is the story of her love affair with a world renowned architect and a British peer. Her sister, Lee, had liaisons with one and possibly both of Jackie's husbands, in addition to her own three marriages—to an illegitimate royal, a Polish prince and a Hollywood director. If the Bouvier women personified beauty, style and fashion, it was their lust for money and status that drove them to seek out powerful men, no matter what the cost to themselves or to those they stepped on in their ruthless climb to the top. Based on hundreds of new interviews with friends and family of the Bouviers, among them their own half-brother, as well as letters and journals, J. Randy Taraborrelli's book paints an extraordinary psychological portrait of two famous sisters and their ferociously ambitious mother.

Download or read book Barbaric Intercourse written by Martha Banta and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-01-15 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Barbaric Intercourse tells the story of a century of social upheaval and the satiric attacks it inspired in leading periodicals in both England and America. Martha Banta explores the politics of caricature and cartoon from 1841 to 1936, devoting special attention to the original Life magazine. For Banta, Life embodied all the strengths and weaknesses of the Progressive Era, whose policies of reform sought to cope with the frenetic urbanization of New York, the racist laws of the Jim Crow South, and the rise of jingoism in the United States. Barbaric Intercourse shows how Life's take on these trends and events resulted in satires both cruel and enlightened. Banta also deals extensively with London's Punch, a sharp critic of American nationalism, and draws from images and writings in magazines as diverse as Puck,The Crisis,Harper's Weekly, and The International Socialist Review. Orchestrating a wealth of material, including reproductions of rarely seen political cartoons, she offers a richly layered account of the cultural struggles of the age, from contests over immigration and the role of the New Negro in American society, to debates over Wall Street greed, women's suffrage, and the moral consequences of Western expansionism.