In this Yale lecture, Professor David Blight examines the Gilded Age, a period he frames through Mark Twain's characterization of a nation covered in gold while riddled with corruption underneath. The lecture surveys developments across the South, North, and West in the decades following the defeat of Reconstruction, connecting regional political and economic change to the broader national trajectory. Recorded in Yale's Battell Chapel as part of the DeVane Lecture series America at 250: A History, the class is part of a one time course tracing United States history from 1776 to the present across lectures by three Yale historians, building on the prior class's account of Reconstruction's defeat.