Today, we begin our investigation into the storied Gilded Age American family, the Vanderbilts. We'll start with the second generation, where no one was shy about their wealth, with the lives of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt, and their seven children. It is a wild ride of 70 years of one family's history that encompasses weddings, divorces, deaths, and a name that is inextricably tied to a time in the life of America.

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