Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents

The years between the effective end of Reconstruction (1870) and the advent of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency (1901) constituted a uniquely transforming era. From an essentially rural, commercial, monoculturally British, and diplomatically insular nation, the United States remade itself as an urban-industrial, multicultural, and militarily vigorous global power. The nation's breathtaking and economic modernization, its citizens' invention of such essentials as the telephone, plastics, barbed wire, and laundry washers and dryers, plus Americans' development of the key instruments of modern warfare (the submarine, the machine gun, the airplane, the tank-tread), and even the emergence of such staples of worldwide popular culture as movies, the mythic cowboy, and jazz music basically occurred during the Gilded Age. This uniquely organized survey divided the Gilded Age chronologically into its three decades and identifies the dominant economic, political, social, and intellectual characters, treating each decade as a more or less discrete period.