A Changing Culture

The years between 1870 and 1945 were a time of radical restructuring in America – an inchoate era marked by a complex, often painful, transformation from a Victorian world to what we have come to regard as the modern one. During this period, Americans, caught up in the thrill of progress and the rush to modernity, experienced a bewildering kaleidoscope of events and developments – the disappearance of the American frontier in the wake of a pathology of uncontrolled expansion; the rise of the New South; secularized religion; an increasingly mechanized and compartmentalized daily life; the advent of the “New Woman”; commercialized recreation; countless labor union challenges to laissez-faire capitalism; the obliteration of regional divisions and differences, first by a national railroad system and later by the automobile, movies, and radio; and the standardization of American culture by a culture industry assisted by technologies of mass communication – to cite some of the more pronounced and dramatic examples. Although this list is by no means exhaustive, it is illustrative of the scope and range of the changes and the accelerating pace of innovation confronting Americans as the nineteenth century ended and they moved into the next. To historian Alan Trachtenberg, the sum of these changes amounted to nothing less than a total cultural transformation “so swift and thorough that many Americans seemed unable to fathom the extent of the upheaval”.