Perhaps the book that Sheila is referring to is The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson. I was already familiar with the term, as perhaps people in the US are to a greater extent than people outside of the Robber Barons' stamping grounds. For the talk, I decided to read the book and it does make fascinating reading and is almost hilarious on the subject of the overbuilding of railroads that occurred due to competition between competing lines. Josephson was an excellent historian and the book is considered a classic. However, it is also a Period Piece in that Josephson was a communist. The book was written in the 1930's when a lot of American intellectuals were communists. He often contrasts the ridiculously wasteful development of the US with the much more sensible development of the USSR where a central government authority was building railroads according to a rational plan. As Annette points out, Chats has some nice quotes about this subject and I did use one in my talk. I was struck when I began working in the lace collection of the MMA to see that the names of the lace donors were already familiar to me from my college education that had included a lot of American history. They were all the same names that constituted the society of the Gilded Age which were also the names of the people who had made great fortunes in the post Civil War economy, ie the Robber Barons. Further investigation revealed that lace collecting was very popular with wealthy people in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century and that many of these wealthy individuals had belonged to a club, the Needle and Bobbin Club, based in New York. And, believe me, they had the money to buy the really good lace, much of which is now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cooper-Hewitt. I have spent a great deal of my adult life socializing with lace clubs, serving officerships in lace clubs, arranging functions for lace clubs and sometimes crying about things that have happened in lace clubs. This is regarded by friends and family as an inexplicable mania peculiar to myself. To discover that the richest and most privileged members of Gilded Age society had chosen to form themselves into a lace club and do exactly the same things I was doing had a certain validating effect that I found quite liberating. Also, focusing on four collectors gave me an opportunity to show close-up slides of their laces, which is, I think, what people really want to see. I don't have any immediate plans to visit Australia, but maybe I will write something someday. Devon
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