The 1900 S

Spurred by the energy and progressive attitude of President Theodore Roosevelt and millions of immigrants flooding into our cities, American life saw tremendous change from 1900-1910. This volume offers a wealth of information on popular culture at the dawn of the 20th century.

Outlines the important social, political, economic, cultural, and technological events that happened in the United States from 1900 to 1909.

This new addition to the Defining Documents series profiles the first decade of the 20th century in America through careful, close analysis of historic documents from the era. Over thirty primary source documents are studied, delivering a thorough examination of this crucial period in American history.

Challenges conventional views of the Edwardian period as either a hangover of Victorianism or a bystander to literary modernismIn this ground-breaking study, Jonathan Wild investigates the literary history of the Edwardian decade. This period, long overlooked by critics, is revealed as a vibrant cultural era whose writers were determined to break away from the stifling influence of preceding Victorianism. In the hands of this generation, which included writers such as Arnold Bennett, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Beatrix Potter, and H.G. Wells, the new century presented a unique opportunity to fashion innovative books for fresh audiences. Wild traces this literary innovation by conceptualising the focal points of his study as branches of one of the new department stores that epitomized Edwardian modernity.a These adepartments war and imperialism, the rise of the lower middle class, childrens literature, technology and decadence, and the condition of England offer both discrete and interconnected ways in which to understand the distinctiveness and importance of the Edwardian literary scene. Overall, The Great Edwardian Emporium offers a long-overdue investigation into a decade of literature that provided the cultural foundation for the coming century.

This volume, arranged chronologically, presents key events that have shaped the decade, from significant political occurrences to details of daily life.

For the first time ever, human beings were in control of their environment. Airplanes, trains, and the first diesel engines let people go faster and farther than ever before. The birth of modern art and sound recording promised new cultural heights, while the invention of jazz music and the popularization of low-cost photography managed to bring societies closer together. This decade, from its arts and fashion to its politics and technological advancements, would help shape a culture and set the stage for the century ahead.

Describes the important world, national, and cultural developments of the decade 1900-1909.

In this book Arturo Almandoz places the major episodes of Latin America’s twentieth and early twenty-first century urban history within the changing relationship between industrialization and urbanization, modernization and development. This relationship began in the early twentieth century, when industrialization and urbanization became significant in the region, and ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when new tensions between liberal globalization and populist nationalism challenge development in the subcontinent, much of which is still poverty stricken. Latin America’s twentieth-century modernization and development are closely related to nineteenth-century ideals of progress and civilization, and for this reason Almandoz opens with a brief review of that legacy for the different countries that are the focus of his book – Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela – but with references to others. He then explores the regional distortions, which resulted from the interaction between industrialization and urbanization, and how the imbalance between urbanization and the productive system helps to explain why ‘take-off’ was not followed by the ‘drive to maturity’ in Latin American countries. He suggests that the close yet troublesome relationship with the United States, the recurrence of dictatorships and autocratic regimes, and Marxist influences in many domains, are all factors that explain Latin America’s stagnation and underdevelopment up to the so-called ‘lost decade’ of 1980s. He shows how Latin America’s fate changed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when neoliberal programmes, political compromise and constitutional reform dismantled the traditional model of the corporate state and centralized planning. He reveals how economic growth and social improvements have been attained by politically left-wing yet economically open-market countries while others have resumed populism and state intervention. All these trends make up the complex scenario for the new century – especially when considered against the background of vibrant metropolises that are the main actors in the book.