LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

By the 1890s the United States had become an urban nation. From being for over a 150 years a nation of rural dwellers, the US had become urbanised. The trend towards urbanisation was irreversible. By 1983 nearly all the elements that we identify with modern America were in place: large scale industry and advanced technology, densely inhabited urban areas, concentrations of capital in banks, businesses and corporations, nationwide systems of transportation and print communication, and a heterogeneous population of diverse races, classes, and ethnic groups.

 The launching of the Spanish-American War five years later solidified the final element: imperialistic power. This would characterise the nation in the twentieth century. Skyscrapers manifested the nations immense new business and commercial energy and the slums lacked sanitation and were places of poverty, child labour, prostitution, violence and crime.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

Anglo-Saxon dominance in a nation where African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans and other racial, ethnic, and religious groups were becoming increasingly apparent. Technological advancement as a result of the war.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

Jackson Turner, historian, announces in his paper The Significance of the Frontier in American History the end of the frontier in the USA, no more open land. The Civil War had demanded both massive, coordinated planning in the use of material resources and intense moral commitment and sacrifice. The post-war period saw general acceptance of a laissez-faire policy under which business, through its enormous economic power, was able to exert often corrupting pressure on the government. The period between the 1870s and the 1890s was marked by corruption.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

The concentration of vast resources in the hands of a few constituted one of the most drastic changes from the pre-war period. Business, big business was the order of the day, and the fortunes reaped from it were justified by an ideology that drew upon the old protestant ethic of the virtuousness of industry and of the acquisition of wealth as proof of Gods favour, and also on the new social thinking derived from Darwins biological theories of human evolution, which defended what sociologist Herbert Spencer termed the survival of the fittest.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

Publishing turned national. By 1860 large publishing houses located in the cities could reach national markets by way of the railroads and books and magazines could be produced more rapidly and cheaply with the new technology of the steam powered rotary presses, multiple presses and binding machines. Dime novels became popular. Horatio Alger publishes more than a hundred novels with titles like Strive and Succeed or Struggling Upward were catchy labels for their packaged messages of success achieved through a combination of industriousness, middle class morality and luck.

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY 1865-1910

Publishing industry reflected the growing diversity of the American population. 1200 foreign language periodicals were in existence by 1896.