MacColl offers American readers a field guide to the backstory of Downton Abbey--the decade or so when British aristocrats, reeling from the agricultural depression of 1870 and saddled with decaying country houses, started to see the advantages of piles of American nouveau riche money. With context in the rigid and exclusionary New York Knickerbocker social register, the court morals of Edward VII and the sheer weight of keeping up appearances, this is an easily digestible account of how US financing supported an extinction burst of lordly privilege before the meteor of WWI.