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    978-0-8223-2512-3
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    978-0-8223-2476-8
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  • List of Figures  
    Acknowledgments  
    A Timeline of America at Centurys End  
    Introduction  
    1. Becoming Cultured and Culture as Commodity  
    The Ideal of Culture (Chautauquan) / F. W. Gunsaulus, D.D.  
    Wealth (North American Review) / Andrew Carnegie  
    Brief Observations on the Habit of Reading (Critic)  
    The Reading Habit  
    Courses of Reading  
    What Chicago People Read  
    A Note on Servants Libraries  
    The Novel-Reading Habit (Arena) / George Clarke, Ph.D.  
    The Pelican (Scribners) / Edith Wharton  
    The Economic Theory of Womens Dress (Popular Science Monthly) / Dr. Thorstein Veblen  
    2. The Idea of Types  
    The Modern American Mood (Harpers) / William Dean Howells  
    The Provincials, from a series, Sketches of American Types (Scribners) / Octave Thanet  
    The Conduct of Life, from a series, The Art of Living (Scribners) / Robert Grant  
    Talma Gordon (Colored American Magazine) / Pauline E. Hopkins  
    The Ecollege Graduate and Public Life (Atlantic Monthly) / Theodore Roosevelt  
    The Awakening of the Negro (Atlantic Monthly) / Booker T. Washington  
    The Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future (Arena) / Susan B. Anthony  
    3. Labor  
    The WorkersThe West: Among the Revolutionaries (Scribners) / Walter A. Wyckoff  
    In the Depths of a Coal Mine (McClures) / Stephen Crane  
    A Paying Concern: A True Story of American Factory Life (McClures) / Gertrude Roscoe  
    The Night Run of the Overland: A Story of Domestic Life Among the Railroad People (McClures) / Elmore Elliott Peake  
    Women and Girls in Sweat-Shops (Chautauquan) / Florence Kelley  
    Working-Girls Clubs, (Scribners) / Clara Sidney Davidge  
    4. Social, Ethnic, and Racial Strife  
    Club Life Among Outcasts (Harpers) / Josiah Flynt  
    The Future of the Red Man (Forum) / Simon Pokagon  
    Lynch Law in the South (North American Review) / Frederick Douglass  
    A Ghetto Wedding (Atlantic Monthly) / Abraham Cahan  
    The Genesis of the Gang (Atlantic Monthly) / Jacob A. Riis  
    Step-Brothers to Dives (Harpers) / Louise Betts Edwards  
    5. Mental Health & Physical Training  
     The Gospel of Relaxation (Scribners) / William James  
    Fashions Slaves (Arena) / B. O. Flower  
     Woman and the Bicycle (Scribners) / Marguerite Merington  
    A Fin de Cycle Incident (Outing) / Edna C. Jackson  
    Physical Education vs. Degeneracy (Independent) / H. W. Foster  
    On Being Civilized Too Much (Atlantic Monthly) / Henry Charles Merwin  
    6. The Promises of Formal Education  
    A Negro Schoolmaster in the New South (Atlantic Monthly) / W. E. Burghardt Du Bois  
    Modern College Education (Cosmopolitan) / John Brisben Walker  
    The Greatest Need of College Girls (Atlantic Monthly) / Annie Payson Call  
    The School Days of an Indian Girl (Atlantic Monthly) / Zitkala-Sa  
    The March of Progress (Century) / Charles W. Chesnutt  
    The Ingrate (New England Magazine) / Paul Laurence Dunbar  
    The Genius of Bowlder Bluff (Scribners) / Abbe Carter Goodloe  
    7. The Future and Cultural Change  
    What a Great City Might BeA Lesson from the White City (New England Magazine) / John Coleman Adams  
    The Problem of the West (Atlantic Monthly) / Frederick J. Turner  
    The Divorce of Man from Nature (Arena) / Anna R. Weeks  
    Susans Escort (Harpers) / Edward Everett Hale  
    Twenty-Four: Four (Harpers) / Elizabeth Stuart Phelps  
    Within an Ace of the End of the World (McClures) / Robert Barr  
    Bibliography  
    Index  

  • “A splendid collection! This combination of fiction, editorials, and essays offers multiple themes and insights into the concerns of 1890s America that still hold sway over the public imagination today.”— Emory Elliott, University of California, Riverside

    “This excellent sourcebook covers a range of topics, from education to mental health, from labor and the city to reading and culture. A thorough and well-conceived collection.”—Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form

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  • Description

    America at the last fin de siècle was in a period of profound societal transition. Industrialization was well under way and with it a burgeoning sense of professionalism and a growing middle class that was becoming increasingly anxious about issues of race, gender, and class. The American 1890s: A Cultural Reader is a wide-ranging anthology of essays, criticism, and fiction first printed in periodicals during those last remarkable years of the nineteenth century, a decade commonly referred to as the “golden age” of periodical culture.
    To depict the many changes taking place in the United States at this time, Susan Harris Smith and Melanie Dawson have drawn from an eclectic range of periodicals: elite monthlies such as Scribner’s, Harper’s, and the Atlantic Monthly; political magazines such as the North American Review and Forum; magazines for general readers such as Cosmopolitan and McClures; and specialized publications including the Chatauquan, Outing, and Colored American Magazine. Authors represented in the collection include Andrew Carnegie, Edith Wharton, Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, Stephen Crane,
    W. E. B. DuBois, Jacob Riis, and Frederick Jackson Turner. A general introduction to the period, a brief contextualizing essay for each selection, and a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources are provided as well. In examining and debating the decade’s momentous political and social developments, the essays, editorials, and stories in this anthology reflect a constantly shifting culture at a time of internal turmoil, unprecedented political expansion, and a renaissance of modern ideas and new technologies.
    Bringing together a carefully chosen selection of primary sources, The American 1890s presents a remarkable variety of views—nostalgic, protective, imperialist, progressive, egalitarian, and democratic—held by American citizens a century ago.

    About The Author(s)

    Susan Harris Smith is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of American Drama: The Bastard Art and Masks in Modern Drama.

    Melanie Dawson is a Visiting Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
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