Welcome to the History Tricks, where any resemblance to a boring old history lesson is purely coincidental.

Hello, it's Susan. Today we're going to take a double time travel trip.

Not only are we going to travel back in time to the late 1800s, early 1900s, but we're going to travel back into our archives to the Gilded Age.

Specifically, Gilded Age erasers and servants, and usually they're presented in that order.

Erasers, they're so glitzy and glamorous, we want to hear all those stories. Oh, and then about the servants.

But we're going to switch it up a little bit. First, Beckett is going to talk about the servants of the era, the servants that are Gilded Age erasers would have encountered once they moved to their new homes in Europe.

And then we're going to talk about Gilded Age erasers together.

We're going to talk about three different waves of erasers and how we got to the position that moneyed American women were going to Europe to married titled Nobility.

How do we get there? Now why is this so important to us right now?

Two words, Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey, the television show premiered here in the United States in January of 2011.

You know what else premiered in January of 2011? The History Tricks.

And Downton Abbey and the History Tricks are kind of related. Julian Fellows and Beckett Graham both use the same book to inspire their projects.

So we've always felt a kinship to our cousins at Downton Abbey. And because the movie's coming out, we ourselves have been thinking a lot about the Gilded Age so we figured you would too.

The two episodes that we've combined today are from 2011. They're from the very beginning of our journey here podcasting.

We recorded this back when we sat around one microphone together at one table, a large wooden table and a large wooden house. Beckett's house, the house of wood.

So we've done our best to clean up the audio. We've edited it down a little bit and combined the two episodes.

In editing, we noticed a couple of things that we promised that we haven't really done. I do want to say there is no specific governance episode in our archives.

However, the governance plays a really important role in quite a few of our subjects lives. Over the years, I think we've painted a really good picture of this important member of the household's life.

So now on with the show. First up, Gilded Age Servants.

There was a complete spectrum of servant life around this time from the poor single lonely only servant made of all work who worked from pre-dawn until after bedtime and was often frankly found dead asleep in the Colbin Hall who did all the work.

To the servants of Blenum, which there's 90 servants, so you can imagine even though it's a bigger place, I think that perhaps the labor was debated more fairly as you go up to scale it definitely seems like a better life to me.

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