America's Light Bulbs Go Off

You know how at every family gathering, Grams is oohing and ahhing over your newest gadget, gizmo, whozit, or whatzit?

Like most old-timers, she'll say, "Golly gee, it's just magnificent what they can do with technology these days." As she adorably struggles with touch-screen technology, you're like, "Hold your horses, Grams. I just tweeted a stinky review on this yesterday."

Naive grandmas and lousy reviews aside, technological advances in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries didn't just equate to a more comprehensive emoji catalog. Those technological advances transformed America.

During the period known as the Gilded Age, the last quarter of the nineteenth century, America had its smarty-pants on, building on the innovations of the first Industrial Revolution and the national networks of transportation and communication established by railroad track and telegraph line earlier in the century. Inventive Americans created brand new industries and tapped into a truly national market for manufactures and consumer goods. 

By 1900, the turn of the century and what historians refer to as the Second Industrial Revolution, American society was one of mass production, mass consumption, and mass marketing. 

Which means...massive amounts of money.

The nation was poised to assume the global lead in technology and industry.

In short, the United States emerged from the final decades of the nineteenth century as an increasingly urban, heavily-industrialized world power—the product of a technological transformation that profoundly altered American life and society in every respect.

If the Civil War violently demonstrated that the United States was one nation politically, the technology-driven events of the 1880s and 1890s would draw the nation together economically, socially, and culturally as never before.

The America we now know was molded in those years of change and the contours of the society we consider to be "modern" were established largely through the innovations of the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

Someone born into middle or upper-class society in the 1880s might very well have been a telephone-using, streetcar-riding, motion-picture-watching, Coca-Cola-drinking suburban teenager by the early 1900s.

Starting to sound familiar?

While it's hard to draw a line in history saying "modern America starts here," it's easy to see that by 1900 the historical "them" were starting to look a lot more like present-day "us."

Gram's wonderment about today's technologies may seem innocent and adorable, but if we take a step back, it should be easy to understand that we should be impressed by what technology can do. And maybe we should be minding our p's and q's when we talk to Mr. Google.

If you're a fan of your microwave, your in-flight Wi-Fi, and your group chats, pause on submitting the stinky Yelp review.

We have an age of great inventions to thank for getting us to where we are now.