1890s

Modem America emerged during a forty-year crisis that began with the Civil War (1861–1865) and ended with the war against Spain in 1898. The crisis, which recast every part of the nation’s life, climaxed in the 1890s. At the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Americans celebrated their triumphs in industry and technology while, ironically, enduring the nation’s worst economic depression. A young historian, Frederick Jackson Turner of the University of Wisconsin, delivered a speech at this world’s fair that helped explain the irony. The vast open lands of the West, Turner asserted, had shaped American social and political institutions. According to the 1890 census, however, these lands had finally been settled. Turner concluded: “And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.” Scholars later agreed that Turner overemphasized the importance of the frontier in the shaping of American character, but few, then or since, would deny that a different America was indeed bom in the last years of the century. The birth pains were promising—and terrifying.