Myths and Heroes

Introduction:

I am going to talk about the notion “Myths and Heroes”.

A Myth can be defined as a story based on a popular belief or a figure that marked history and reflect the habits and customs of a country such as the Greek culture. Moreover a hero is a person admired for his or her achievements, courage and noble qualities especially in Greek mythology.

But we can also find this notion in our daily lives, for example in the movies we see like Avengers or Mr. Trump who can be judged as a myth as he’s the most hated president of the US. This notion is indeed timeless. That’s why one might wonder why the Gilded Age was a time of ambivalent myths and heroes?

My presentation is made up of two main parts. I will begin with an insight into the positive elements of this era and then I would like to talk about a more sinister side of the Gilded Age.

I/ Positive Elements:

First, The Gilded Age was a “boom time” for America. We indeed read an article called “America’s Gilded Age” which showed us that this era boosted the economy of America as I quote money from London and Paris poured into the US. The journalist tries to point out that the GA was an era of industrialisation, businesses…

The main idea behind this article is that during this era several industries, including oil, steel, sugar and cotton became controlled by a few large companies, run by trusts. The trust turned their owners, who sometimes came from nothing, into some of the richest people to ever live.

Indeed the Gilded Age can be seen as also the epitome of the American Dream.

In class we did the biography of a robber baron. We found out that some of them were coming from a very modest background. For example, I did a short biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He was often described as a hard working man, who left school very early in order to work with his father. He built his wealth out of sweat and work. That is what the Gilded Age enabled. For example the Vanderbilt family is nowadays still one of the richest family in the US.

C. Vanderbilt was also called philanthropist as he gave 1 million dollars to found a University in Nashville for example.

II/ Sinister Side:

However the Gilded Age showed a much darker side as a lot of injustices between the classes occurred.

The first document for this part I have chosen is a video summarizing the Gilded Age. The journalist draws our attention to the fact that during this era the US showed two faces. Because of the rapid industrialisation which led to poor treatment of the workers but increase of wealth of the owners, many social upheavals occurred. Workers organized into unions and new form of journalism emerged, like muckraking.

The journalist criticizes the way the Gilded Age was praised while it was an ambivalent era where there was social class injustice, where the workers would earn only low wages or work in appalling conditions.

In class we also read a text from a book called Maggie, written by Stephen Crane in 1863. It deals with child labour during the Gilded Age. Through this extract, the author wants to show us that this era also crushed a little girls

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