The developments and technical innovations of the 19th century U.S. pictured on Alec Michod's "The White City"

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 3, University of Würzburg (Neuphilologisches Institut), course: Englische Literaturwissenschaft, language: English, abstract: This paper will deal with how American culture changed and grew near the end of the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution, the American Civil War ¿ which ended up with the abolition of Slavery ¿ Reconstruction Era and much more historical and political occurrences, stamped the United States as a nation ¿ the nation as we know it nowadays. In this paper, however, only the most serious development ¿ the Industrial Revolution and its heir ¿ will be handled, as otherwise dwelling on details of all 19th century occurrences would go beyond the boundaries.

To introduce the topic and issue, background information on the 19th century U.S. will be provided. The Industrial Revolution represents a term that can¿t easily be assigned to a specific point of time, but rather a period of time that started approximately around the 1850s and ended presumably at the beginning of the new century. It¿s hard to define a date as the Industrial Revolution, also called ¿The Machine Age¿, had been a kind of process that had its beginnings in Great Britain and only came to America later on. What can be told for sure is that this Revolution with all its technical innovations and improvements in all fields of life represents the ¿break-through¿ of America as a superpower. These and more aspects will be explained at the beginning of the main part.

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