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[Here is the fifth and final installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! The Breakers. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, depth, and breadth of the self-guided audio tour at The Breakers—that tour, to be clear, provided starting points for all five of this week’s blog topics—but was particularly taken aback, in a good way, by a provocative question raised right at the tour’s outset. The narrator asks directly whether preserving mansions like The Breakers is a worthwhile pursuit for an organization such as the Preservation Society of Newport County —whether such mansions are architecturally or artistically worth preserving, whether the...

[Here is the fourth installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Alva Vanderbilt, 1883. At the same time that Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt were building The Breakers, Cornelius’s brother William and his wife Alva were completing their own Newport mansion, Marble House . Located just down the street from each other, these two Vanderbilt homes jointly exemplified and dominated late 19th-century Newport society, and it’s easy to see the two women as similarly parallel. Yet the two marriages ended in very different ways—Cornelius died suddenly in 1899, at the age of 56, and the widowed Alice lived 34 more years but never remarried; Alva controver...

[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney , 1916, by Robert Henri.  Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married  Harry Payne Whitney  (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own , becoming prominent raceho...

[Here is the second installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! While I hope that yesterday’s post complicated some of the simplest narratives about a figure like Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it was nonetheless, I admit, still pretty crazy to use the phrase “rags to riches” to describe Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson. But how about  Rudolph “Rudy” Stanish , who began life as the seventh of thirteen children born to an Eastern European (Croatian and Serbian) immigrant couple in Yukon, Pennsylvania, and ended his life as the world famous Omelet King , chef to some of America’s most prominent people and families? A young man who was brough...

[Here we present the first installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), the man for whom The Breakers was built (as perhaps the most luxurious “summer cottage” in human history), was named after his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), who at his death was the wealthiest man in the United States. Which is to say, young Cornelius wasn’t just born into privilege; he was perhaps the closest thing to the royal baby American society has produced. Moreover, over the thirty-four years between his birth and his grandfather’s death, a period that culminated quite tellingly with the start of the G...

From Puck magazine, 1912. Benjamin Railton In the final stages of my work on The Chinese Exclusion Act: What It Can Teach Us About America (Palgrave Pivot, June 21, 2013) I found myself struggling with a challenge that I believe faces all of us who seek to produce works of public scholarship. Much of the history on which my book focuses is well known to academic historians, but is (to my mind) almost entirely unknown (if not indeed often misrepresented) within the broader American community. For example, the first of the three main “lessons” I seek to draw from the Chinese Exclusion Act has to do with the history of legal and illegal immigration, and more exactly with the commonplace phrase “My ancestors came here legally.” Academic historians are likely to know that there were no national immigration laws prior to the 1882 Exclusion Act (or at least its immediate predecessors/starting points such as the Page Act), that prior to 1921 there remained no laws that affected any immigra...