The Gilded Age certainly wasn't just a period in history that took place only in New York.

New York was indeed its social and financial center.

However, fortunes were made and lost, faux-French chateaus built and burned,

and society queens and princes took their thrones and were sometimes dethroned in the rapidly growing cities all across the country.

San Francisco found itself coated in gold dust from the miners rush earlier in the 19th century,

and cities like St. Louis along the Mississippi found wealth and prestige from shipping and trade.

But one city rose to particular prominence as it sat on the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago. Chicago had its own

story of how it grew, competed with New York, the Emerald City of the East, and in the end

achieved its own renowned and cultural and social reputation.

Today's story focuses on one particular woman who rose to the top of not only Chicago's increasingly

elite society, but at least, according to some aristocratic Europeans, as our guest today will

explain she deserved the title

of uncrowned queen of all America. She was Bertha Ornore Palmer, and I'm so excited to be joined

by my guest today, architectural and social historian Tom Miller, to take a look at the life

and work of Bertha Palmer.

While she can be compared in some ways to New York's famed Mrs. Astor,

Bertha Palmer was most definitely her own woman.

Music Hello, I'm Carl Raymond, the host of the Gilded Gentleman History podcast, where every two weeks we sit down for a nice cup of tea and a chat about the world's upstairs and downstairs in the grand drawing rooms and dodgy alleyways of America's Gilded Age,

Francis Bel-Ipac, and England's late Victorian and Edwardian eras.

The opening of the world's Colombian exposition in Chicago on May 1st, 1893, was meant to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus's arrival in this Western world.

And honor it, it did.

But much more than that, the fair was a moment that captured the attention of the entire world.

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