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LATE NINETEENTH

CENTURY 1865-1910

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By the 1890s the United States had become an urbannation. From being for over a 150 years a nation of ruraldwellers, the US had become urbanised. The trendtowards urbanisation was irreversible.

By 1983 nearly all the elements that we identify withmodern America were in place: large scale industry andadvanced technology, densely inhabited urban areas,concentrations of capital in banks, businesses andcorporations, nationwide systems of transportation and

print communication, and a heterogeneous population ofdiverse races, classes, and ethnic groups.

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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 andcrime.

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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.

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LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1865-1910

Jackson Turner, historian, announces in his paper TheSignificance of the Frontier in American History the endof 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 intensemoral commitment and sacrifice. The post-war periodsaw general acceptance of a laissez-faire policy underwhich business, through its enormous economic power,was able to exert often corrupting pressure on the

government. The period between the 1870s and the1890s was marked by corruption.

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LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1865-1910

The concentration of vast resources in the handsof a few constituted one of the most drasticchanges from the pre-war period. Business, bigbusiness was the order of the day, and the

fortunes reaped from it were justified by anideology that drew upon the old protestant ethicof the virtuousness of industry and of theacquisition 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 HerbertSpencer termed the survival of the fittest.

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LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

1865-1910

Publishing turned national. By 1860 large publishinghouses located in the cities could reach national marketsby way of the railroads and books and magazines couldbe 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 publishesmore than a hundred novels with titles like Strive andSucceed or Struggling Upward were catchy labels for

their packaged messages of success achieved through acombination of industriousness, middle class moralityand luck.

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1865-1910

Publishing industry reflected the growing

diversity of the American population. 1200

foreign language periodicals were in

existence by 1896.