This paper will deal with how American culture changed and grew near the end of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War – which ended up with the abolition of Slavery – Reconstruction Era and much more historical and political occurrences, stamped the United States as a nation – the nation as we know it nowadays. In this paper, however, only the most serious development – the Industrial Revolution and its heir – will be handled, as otherwise dwelling on details of all 19th century occurrences would go beyond the boundaries.
To introduce the topic and issue, background information on the 19th century U.S. will be provided. The Industrial Revolution represents a term that can’t easily be assigned to a specific point of time, but rather a period of time that started approximately around the 1850s and ended presumably at the beginning of the new century. It’s hard to define a date as the Industrial Revolution, also called “The Machine Age”, had been a kind of process that had its beginnings in Great Britain and only came to America later on. What can be told for sure is that this Revolution with all its technical innovations and improvements in all fields of life represents the “break-through” of America as a superpower. These and more aspects will be explained at the beginning of the main part.
[...]
Table of Contents
I. Introduction
II. The White City
1. Background information on the 19th century U.S
1.1 The Industrial Revolution “The Machine Age”
1.2 The heir of the Industrial Revolution
2. The White City – the real story behind the book
2.1 The historical novel
2.2 The Chicago World’s Fair
2.3 H.H. Holmes – America’s first serial killer
3. The impacts of the developments of the 19th century related to Alec Michod’s The White City
III. Conclusion
IV. Bibliography
I. Introduction
The Gilded Age – the time between Reconstruction and the Spanish-American War – marked the beginnings of modern America. The advertising industry became an important part of selling the American dream. Americans dined out more than ever before, and began to take leisure activities more seriously. Women’s fashion gradually grew less restrictive, and architecture experienced and American Renaissance.[1]
This paper will deal with how American culture changed and grew near the end of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War – which ended up with the abolition of Slavery – Reconstruction Era and much more historical and political occurrences, stamped the United States as a nation – the nation as we know it nowadays. In this paper, however, only the most serious development – the Industrial Revolution and its heir – will be handled, as otherwise dwelling on details of all 19th century occurrences would go beyond the boundaries.
To introduce the topic and issue, background information on the 19th century U.S. will be provided. The Industrial Revolution represents a term that can’t easily be assigned to a specific point of time, but rather a period of time that started approximately around the 1850s and ended presumably at the beginning of the new century. It’s hard to define a date as the Industrial Revolution, also called “The Machine Age”, had been a kind of process that had its beginnings in Great Britain and only came to America later on. What can be told for sure is that this Revolution with all its technical innovations and improvements in all fields of life represents the “break-through” of America as a superpower. These and more aspects will be explained at the beginning of the main part.
The White City is not only another novel about a serial killer being on the loose and that is being caught or not in the end. It is a novel based on true occurrences. The serial killer that is described did exist in the 19th century U.S. The author Alec Michod made his first novel special by telling the real story about America’s first serial killer H.H. Holmes and fictionalizing it by fictitious characters and places, and what is more by alerting the story of the killings. This “phenomenon” of mixing facts and fiction is, in literature terms, known as the historical novel. So, the chapter to follow will give a general idea of what the story is about, about the truth behind the book, of who the person was that so unpredictably and unscrupulous killed so many innocent people – to be more precise young boys – in such a horrifying and animal kind of way.
Chapter three will make up the real main part of this research paper: all those background information that was given in chapter one and two will be related to Alec Michod’s The White City. This means an analysis of how the author managed (or not) to combine facts and fiction with the real life in the turn-of-the-century U.S., in which way he uses specific means as regards contents to provide the reader with the background of a nation in that very period of time and also how he uses these means to place any reader in a century full of changes and innovations combined with a thrilling series of murders.
II. The White City
1. Background information on the 19th century U.S.
1.1 The Industrial Revolution “The Gilded Age”
The Gilded Age was a period of incredible change, and the United States looked very different by the 1890s than it had in the 1870s. Urbanization was transforming American culture as urban residents and values came to dominate American discourse. Even rural America underwent its own metamorphosis as the forces of industrialization mass produced agricultural machines that dramatically increased yields. The very nature of American democracy was tested as millions of immigrants streamed into the nation, the U.S. government won the last of the Indian Wars, and American society had to come to grips with the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction regarding the place of African Americans. Through all of these contentious changes the federal government accomplished important tasks including Reconstruction, civil service reform, and the beginnings of industrial regulation.[2] [3]
As already mentioned at the beginning of this paper, the Industrial Revolution, also called the “Gilded Age” or the “Machine Age”, is a term that can’t be assigned to a certain point of time. You can tell that it started around the 1850s, and lasted up to the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, it is rather a process than a state. The Industrial Revolution can be traced back, indeed, to the invention of the first cotton mill – in Great Britain in 1733. The British, however, wanted to keep their progress secret and prohibited everyone working in a British factory to leave the country and pass the secret. Samuel Slater, a factory worker from England, however, immigrated to America in 1789 and built the first cotton mill there. The secret was passed in the end and resulted in the Industrial Revolution coming to America. When thinking of the Industrial Revolution, one automatically would associate inventions, innovations and change. To be more precise, things people have in mind are: the telephone, the steam engine, the electric light bulb, the railroad system, boats and ships, cars, fashion, new culture and lifestyle, emancipation etc. And they are right: The most important thing about the Industrial Revolution are the changes and developments, the “heir”, it had brought along with.
1.2 The heir of the Industrial Revolution
The lives of average Americans underwent enormous changes in the Gilded Age since the country was transformed by the forces of urbanization, immigration, industrialization, mechanization, and a revolution in transportation.
To start with, urbanization represents an important change resulting from the Industrial Revolution. Immense urban growth was one of the most crucial developments of the Gilded Age. At the beginning of the Civil War (1861) America was predominantly rural and livelihood was almost entirely made from agriculture. By the turn of the century, however, the nation had become an industrial giant with an exceeding urban network. Most strikingly is the fact that people relocated from rural areas and small towns to metropolises and huge cities. Not only had people’s values been altered (leisure activities were embraced as one of the best things in life), but also had the geographical layout of the cities. “The Gilded Age gave birth to the metropolis in the United States, and these great urban centers began to exert increasing influence over the nation.”[4] Along with urban growth went a growth in population. America’s urban population amounted to 6.2 million in 1860, but climbed up exponentially to 30 million within forty years. “New York City, for example, took over 200 years to reach a population of roughly 500,000 by 1850, but by 1900 counted over 3.4 million residents!”[5]
[...]
[1] Joel Shrock, The American Popular Culture Through History. The Gilded Age (London: Greenwood Press, 2004) 1.
[2] Cf. Paul Boyer, The Enduring Vision. A history of the American people. (Boston [u.a.]: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).
[3] Shrock 1
[4] Shrock 1-2
[5] Shrock 2