1 gen 1925 anni - Summary

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In the era of industrialization, new intellectual currents, including Darwinism, challenged nineteenth-century certainties. Debates over evolution, especially its implications for the human species, proved particularly intense and long-lasting. “Survival of the fittest” — a term invented not by Charles Darwin, but by Herbert Spencer — was cited to justify ruthless business practices and inequalities of wealth. Eugenic “science” underlay such discriminatory practices as forced sterilization and laws against interracial marriage.
Science and modernism did not, however, displace religion. Newly arrived Catholics and Jews, as well as old-line Protestants, adapted their faiths to the conditions of modern life. Foreign missions spread the Christian gospel around the world, with mixed results for those receiving the message.

In the arts, realist and naturalist writers rejected both romanticism and the tenets of domesticity. Many Americans were shocked by the results, including the boldly modernist paintings displayed at New York’s Armory Show.

Industrialization and new consumer practices created foundations for modern American culture. While middle-class families sought to preserve the Victorian domestic ideal, a variety of factors transformed family life. Families had fewer children, and a substantial majority of young people achieved more education than their parents had obtained. Across class and gender lines, Americans enjoyed athletics and the outdoors, fostering the rise of environmentalism.

Among an array of women’s reform movements, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union sought prohibition of liquor, but it also addressed issues such as domestic violence, poverty, and education. Members of women’s clubs pursued a variety of social and economic reforms, while other women organized for race uplift and patriotic work. Gradually, the Victorian ideal of female moral superiority gave way to modern claims for women’s equal rights.

African Americans faced new challenges after Reconstruction ended. Lynchings and antiblack violence were practiced more openly across the South; the Supreme Court gave national sanction to segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and by the early twentieth century, most black southerners were barred from the polls. African American leaders pursued several different strategies amid this “revolution gone backward.” Booker T. Washington advised patience and accommodation, hoping that African American respectability and business success would change white minds. A younger generation of activists, including anti-lynching Ida B. Wells, began to take a more militant stance against segregation and violence.

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