Major Project: Pre Production 3

Historical Research

I have been doing some research into United States history and think I have found a period of time that will prove very interesting for a major project.

Mansions of the Gilded Age

In US history the Gilded Age is a brief era of time between the 1870's to about 1900. In the years following the American Civil War, the Gilded Age saw a rapid economic growth as American wages surpassed those in Europe, prompting an influx of millions of European immigrants. Despite this economic boom, the Gilded Age was a time of abject poverty and inequality. As Steve Frasier states in his book "The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power" (2015), in terms of property, the wealthiest 1% owned 51%, while the bottom 44% claimed just 1.1%. The term "Gilded Age" itself was applied to the era by historians in the 1920's who took it from a Mark Twain novel, "The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" (1873) in which Twain satirized the promised Golden Age after the Civil War, portraying an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding of economic expansion.

During this time of rampant inequality, exceedingly wealthy individuals constructed lavish homes across the country. Families such as the Astors, Vanderbilts, Carnegies, and Rockefellers used their homes to assert their social dominance, establish a legacy, and generate prestige. But the glory days of the Gilded Age home didn’t last long. By the 1920s, many of the Fifth Avenue mansions of New York City were being torn down. In the 1940s, it was not uncommon to read about Newport mansions being auctioned off.

This period of history evokes so much emotion in me and is emblematic of the constant strife between those with wealth and those with not. I think there is so much potential for interesting storytelling here, that this time period is the perfect historical backdrop to set my environment in. 

The mansion I create will tell the story of the former owner, with each room of the house filling in a new part of the story. One idea I am interested in is as the player progresses to the upper floors of the mansion, rooms will become boarded up and closed off, showing the hard times that gradually befell the former owner.

Lawrance, G. (2011) Pembroke, Glen Cove Long Island. [Online Image] Available at: https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse3.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.D3UFppgv6UINkQcfQ4OcDAHaEo%26pid%3D15.1&f=1 [27/02/2018].
 

Sources:

 

CURBED. (2018) Why did Gilded Age mansions lose their luster? [Online] January 2018. Available from: https://www.curbed.com/2017/9/28/16375440/gilded-age-mansion-museum-vanderbilt-newport [Accessed: 27th February 2018]

FRASIER, S. (2015) The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power. New York: Little, Brown and Company.

NICHOLS, C. M. & UNGER, N. C. (2017) A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.