1. What does the term “Gilded Age” mean? In what sense is Mark Twain’s term a criticism of the age? How does the word “gilded” capture the national temperament in the last decades of the nineteenth century?

Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first termed the phrase “Gilded Age” ,which was the period between 1870-1900, they felt that the social climate in which they where living people of means were creating a showy glittering façade but the surface covers a core of little value and therefore is deceptive. In the Gilded Age we see a period of rapid growth, rampant corruption, rising wealth and income inequlity. As the industrial revolution was in full swing and the country was enjoying the benfits of new technology innvoations in every sphere of life. We see emerge a wealthy class of people, which America hadn’t seen before, that controled the majority of the country’s money.. The business men or “robber barron’s”, as they came to be called, enjoyed a time period of lazzi fair economics and grew to be wealth very quickly but began using their wealth to buy offices in order to avoid laws that would help to create more equality. This new emerging group of mean was living extravagant flashy lifestyle all the while the poor got poorer and lived and worked in wretched conditions. They began to resent this new growing rich class of people. We see reformers rise and create Unions like the Knight of labor that begin working towards “equal pay for equal work.”

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How does the “reasonability” standard articulated in the Plessey decision relate to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s dissent in the Court’s Lochner decision

The reasonability standard of the Plessy vs. Ferguson, which came to be summed up un the words “separate but equal” is an example of the judicial activism that Wendall Holmes accused his fellow justices of using in his famous dissenting opnion in