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In the late 19th century, before we had the internet to provide us with a 24-hour stream of people doing stupid things for clout, humanity had to get creative. If you were bored in 1896, you couldn’t just scroll through TikTok; you had to pack a picnic, hop on a rickety locomotive, and travel fifty miles into the Texas heat to watch two massive steam engines run into each other at top speed. This was the Gilded Age, a time of incredible industrial progress, staggering wealth inequality, and a c