Read the following articles from the Topic 5 Readings:

“The Banality of Gilding: Innocuous Materiality and Transatlantic Consumption in the Gilded Age,” “Thorstein Veblen: Conspicuous Consumption, 1902,” and “Americas Gilded Age” and then answer the discussion question that follows:

During the Victorian Age, the upper class became very wealthy in part by exploiting the lower classes. For America to become a great and wealthy nation, was the exuberance and disparity of the Victorian age justified? Explain why.