CH. 18 – Flashcard

- journalist - an abolitionist editor and advocate of Westward expansion and manifest destiny

- produced work startling in its naturalism and stark in its portrayal of the social realities of the era. -

- Famous and controversial - Displayed works of the French postimpressionist and some American moderns - An exposition of art at the Ashcan School, where the pieces portrayed harsh social realities in 1913.

- The work of these and other artists marked the beginning in America of an artistic movement known as modernism, a movement that had counterparts in many other areas of cultural and intellectual life as well. - modernists rejected the grip of the past and embraced new subjects and new forms. - modernism gloried in the ordinary, even the coarse - modernism looked to the future and gloried in the new - modernism developed strict orthodoxies of its own. But in its early stages, it seemed to promise an escape from rigid, formal traditions and an unleashing of individual creativity.

- argued that the human species had evolved from earlier forms of life (and most recently from simian creatures similar to apes) through a process of "natural selection." - suggested, was not the working out of a divine plan, as most Americans had always believed. It was a random process dominated by the fiercest or luckiest competitors

- At the center of the wildly popular exposition was a cluster of neoclassical buildings-the "Great White City"-constructed in the fashionable "beaux-arts" style of the time, arranged symmetrically around a formal lagoon served as inspiration for the "City Beautiful" Movemnet - movement aimed to impose a similar order and symmetry on the disordered life of cities around the country

- architect of the Great White City - "Make no little plans," Burnham liked to tell city planners. - influence led to the remaking of cities all across the country-from Washington, D.C., to Chicago and San Francisco.

- Any politician who could mobilize that power stood to gain enormous influence, if not public office. And so there emerged a group of urban "bosses," themselves often of foreign birth or parentage. - Almost all were men (in most states women could not yet vote) - The principal function of the political boss was simple: to win votes for his organization. - Several factors made boss rule possible. One was the power of immigrant voters, who were less concerned with middle-class ideas of political morality than with obtaining the services that machines provided and reformers did not. - The boss, by virtue of his control over his machine, formed an "invisible government" that provided an alternative to what was often the inadequacy of the regular government.

- In larger cities, the emergence of great department stores (which had appeared earlier in Europe) helped transform buying habits and turn shopping into an alluring and glamorous activity. - Marshall Field in Chicago created one of the first American department stores. - Department stores transformed the concept : - they brought together under one roof an enormous array of products that had previously been sold in separate shops. - they sought to create an atmosphere of wonder and excitement, to make shopping a glamorous activity. - department stores-like mail-order houses-took advantage of economies of scale to sell merchandise at lower prices than many of the individual shops with which they competed.

- was the most well- known realist painted in the U.S at midcentury; most of his paintings portray the stakness and often the loneliness of American life; associated with cold war culture

- carried the motion picture into a new era with his silent epics-The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), and others-which introduced serious plots and elaborate productions to filmmaking.

- Danish immigrant and New York newspaper reporter and photographer, shocked many middle-class Americans with his sensational (and some claimed sensationalized) descriptions and pictures of tenement life in his 1890 book, How the Other Half Lives.

- New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and other cities also experimented with cable cars, towed by continuously moving underground cables. Richmond, Virginia, introduced the first electric trolley line in 1888, and by 1895 such systems were operating in 850 towns and cities. In 1897, Boston opened the first American subway when it put some of its trolley lines underground - 1810-NY opened 1st elevated railway, moving above ground. NY, Chicago, San Fran &others had cable cars towed by continuous moving underground cables. Richmond, VA-1st electric trolley line in 1888. 1897-Boston opened 1st US subway when trolley lines put underground

- One of the strongest impulses in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American literature was the effort to re-create urban social reality -

- novelist - lived the major part of his adult life in England and Europe and produced a series of coldly realistic novels-The American (1877), Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and others-that showed his ambivalence about the character of modern,

- best known for his novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)-was the author of an earlier, powerful indictment of the plight of the working class. Crane created a sensation in 1893 when he published Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a grim picture of urban poverty and slum life

- published The Jungle in 1906, a novel designed to reveal the depravity of capitalism. - The Jungle exposed abuses in the American meatpacking industry; and while it did not inspire the kind of socialist response for which Sinclair had hoped, it did help produce legislative action to deal with the problem

- influential in encouraging writers to abandon the genteel traditions of earlier times and turn to the social dislocations and injustices of the present. He did so both in Sister Carrie and in other, later novels (including An American Tragedy, published in 1925). -

- a southern writer who explored the oppressive features of traditional marriage, encountered widespread public abuse after publication of her shocking novel The Awakening in 1899.

- called "honest graft." - Tammany Hall was powerful New York political organization. It drew support from immigrants. The immigrants relied on Tammany Hall patronage, particularly for social services. This is significant in that it gave immigrants rights to vote.

- most famously corrupt city boss - boss of New York City's Tammany Hall in the 1860s and 1870s, whose excesses finally landed him in jail in 1872.

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- Term given to the overcrowded housing for workers and the poor, refered to as "slum dwellings."

- most powerful newspaper chain - controlled nine newspapers and two magazines

- Hearst and rival publisher Joseph Pulitzer helped popularize what became known as "yellow journalism"-a deliberately sensational, often lurid style of reporting presented in bold graphics, designed to reach a mass audience. - Term used to describe the downplaying of actual news, by creating more "catchy" headlines, to sell more newspapers. Example- William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal

a veteran of the Yiddish theater ,wrote more than 1,000 songs for the musical theater during his long career, including such popular favorites as "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "God Bless America."

- an Irish vaudeville entertainer, became the first great creator of musical comedies in the early twentieth century; in the process of creating his many shows, he wrote a series of patriotic songs-"Yankee Doodle Dandy," "Over There," and "You're a Grand Old Flag"-that remained popular many decades later.

ETHNIC - immigrants listened to the music of their homelands and heard comedians making light of their experiences in the New World. - Italian theaters often drew on the traditions of Italian opera to create sentimental musical events. - The Yiddish theater built on the experiences of American Jews-and was the training ground for a remarkable group of musicians and playwrights who later went on to play a major role in mainstream, English-speaking theater - Urban theaters also introduced one of the most distinctively American entertainment forms: the musical comedy, which evolved gradually from the comic operettas of European theater. VAUDEVILLE - form of theater adapted from French models, was the most popular urban entertainment in the first decades of the twentieth century. - As the economic potential of vaudeville grew, some promoters-most prominently Florenz Ziegfeld of New York-staged much more elaborate spectacles. Vaudeville was also one of the few entertainment media open to black performers. They brought to it elements of the minstrel shows they had earlier developed for black audiences in the late nineteenth century.

Harvard psychologist (and brother of the novelist Henry James), was the most prominent publicist of the new theory, although earlier intellectuals such as Charles S. Peirce and later ones such as John Dewey were also important to its development and dissemination. A

- The most important form of mass entertainment (until the invention of radio and television) was the movies - Thomas Edison and others had created the technology of the motion picture in the 1880s

- In the late 19th century, people began to break ties with their old culture, and conform to the new American lifestyle. Examples- teaching english to immigrant workers and adapting to American fashion and dining.

- leisure-time spent amusing oneself in nonproductive pursuits-was not only unavailable to most Americans, but faintly scorned as well - But with the rapid expansion of the economy and the increasing number of hours workers had away from work, it became possible to imagine leisure time as a normal part of the lives of many people - Others were equally adamant in claiming that leisure time was both a right and an important contribution to an individual's emotional and even spiritual health.

- first intellectuals to articulate this new view of leisure, which he tied closely to the rising interest in consumption