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

Hello and welcome to the show.

Anyone who knows us knows that we are absolutely obsessed with the Gilded Age, which we have

been loosely defining as that era between about 1880 and the sinking of the Titanic.

And today via our friends The Bowry Boys, we are happy to introduce you to Carl Raymond,

a social and culinary historian who is the host of the Gilded Gentlemen Podcast.

Carl Subjects swirl around our former subjects kind of like we are always hitting the 1893 world's fair.

Carl seems to hit on a lot of things that we've talked about in the past.

Gilded Age erases the Mrs. Astor Jenny Jerome Churchill, Emily Post, birth a Palmer who we haven't covered yet,

but we have talked about in a couple former episodes. He even talked with Carol Wallace, one of the few interviews that we've had.

She's a woman who wrote to Mary and English Lord, the book that inspired this, the History Tricks podcast.

We both enjoyed listening to these episodes so much and we thought you would like them too.

We are about to bring you two of his episodes, one about the servants of Old New York,

and one about the madness of the millionaires in Old New York.

And so when I went to visit the Newport cottages, I was able to take the servant tour of the Elms before I took a tour of the main house.

And it was such a good way to visit the sellers, visit the addicts and see what really happened behind the scenes before you saw the glittering golden surface of what was happening in public.

And so we think that's the way we're going to present them to you in act one invisible magicians car was joined by Esther Cranes.

She's the author of the Guilded Age in New York 1870 to 1914 and they pay tribute to the world of the domestic servant, the vast numbers of what they call invisible magicians without whom the dinners and the balls and the daily workings of the household of the guilded age would never have happened.

And now on with the show. The images of the opulent mansion sprawling lawns highly polished silver and crystal and of course impeccably cared for fashions and exquisitely prepared French food are some of the first images our minds conjure up when we think about the guilded age.

All of that is accurate but the story of the armies of servants, housekeepers, butlers, footmen, ladiesmaids, parlor maids, chambermaids, gardeners, valets, chefs, cooks and scullery maids that were all required to keep it going make it look flawless and make sure their employers always put their highly polished right foot forward.

Well that's perhaps the most important story of all. Quite simply, without these workers whose hours were long and whose pay was low without them despite how much money their employers had without them none of that outward glamour of this world would have ever come to be.

Today I am joined by author and speaker Esther Crane to take a deeper look into the world below stairs and see what went on quite literally behind the gold.

...