Background
During the decades following the Civil War, the United States experienced tremendous economic growth and the concomitant accumulation of enormous wealth by a select, but growing and increasingly interrelated, group of industrialists and financiers who were determined to join the ranks of the established upper class. To assimilate themselves into society, these new plutocrats lavishly spent their newfound wealth to acquire all of the physical manifestations of the aristocratic life, including large country houses in one or more of the country’s exclusive residential “colonies,” such the Somerset Hills of New Jersey. These great country estates were intended to be examples of conspicuous consumption and the pursuit of leisure and a blatant statement of the owner’s social standing.(Jack Turpin)
Read more about this topic: Somerset Hills
Famous quotes containing the word background:
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