Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the phrase “the Gilded Age” to refer to the late nineteenth century in their book of the same name. In the popular view, the Gilded Age was a period of greed and guile, when rapacious robber barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers engaged in shady business practices and vulgar displays of wealth. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, scandal-plagued politics, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism, but the Gilded Age can also be thought of...