who came up with the phrase gilded age and what was meant by it
Gilded Age The term "Gilded Age" for the period of economic boom after the American Civil War up to the turn of the century was applied to the era by historians in the 1920s, who took the term from one of Mark Twain's lesser known novels, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873). The book (co-written with Charles Dudley Warner) satirized the promised 'golden age' after the Civil War, portrayed as an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding of economic expansion.[4] In the 1920s and 30s "Gilded Age" became a designated period in American history. The term was adopted by literary and cultural critics as well as historians, including Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Charles Austin Beard, Mary Ritter Beard, Vernon Louis Parrington and Matthew Josephson. For them, "Gilded Age" was a pejorative term used to describe a time of materialistic excesses combined with extreme poverty.[5][6]
Dark Ages (historiography) The term employs traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the era's "darkness" with earlier and later periods of "light".[3] The concept of a "Dark Age" originated in the 1330s with the Italian scholar Petrarch, who regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity.[3][4] The phrase "Dark Age" itself derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a tumultuous period in the 10th and 11th centuries.[5] The concept thus came to characterize the entire Middle Ages as a time of intellectual darkness between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; this became especially popular during the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment.[3]