The American 1890s: a cultural reader

Timeline of America at Century's End

1. Becoming Cultured and Culture as Commodity

Ideal of Culture / F. W. Gunsaulus

Wealth / Andrew Carnegie

Reading Habit / Critic

Courses of Reading / Critic

What Chicago People Read / Critic

Note on Servants' Libraries / Critic

Novel-Reading Habit / George Clarke

Pelican / Edith Wharton

Economic Theory of Women's Dress / Thorstein Veblen

2. Idea of Types

Modern American Mood / William Dean Howells

Provincials, from a series, Sketches of American Types / Octave Thanet

Conduct of Life, from a series, The Art of Living / Robert Grant

Talma Gordon / Pauline E. Hopkins

College Graduate and Public Life / Theodore Roosevelt

Awakening of the Negro / Booker T. Washington

Status of Woman, Past, Present, and Future / Susan B. Anthony

3. Labor

Workers - The West: Among the Revolutionaries / Walter A. Wyckoff

In the Depths of a Coal Mine / Stephen Crane

Paying Concern: A True Story of American Factory Life / Gertrude Roscoe

Night Run of the 'Overland': A Story of Domestic Life Among the Railroad People / Elmore Elliott Peake

Women and Girls in Sweat-Shops / Florence Kelley

Working-Girl's Clubs / Clara Sidney Davidge

4. Social, Ethnic, and Racial Strife

Club Life Among Outcasts / Josiah Flynt

Future of the Red Man / Simon Pokagon

Lynch Law in the South / Frederick Douglass

Ghetto Wedding / Abraham Cahan

Genesis of the Gang / Jacob A. Riis

Step-Brothers to Dives / Louise Betts Edwards

5. Mental Health & Physical Training

Gospel of Relaxation / William James

Fashion's Slaves / B. O. Flower

Woman and the Bicycle / Marguerite Merington

Fin de Cycle Incident / Edna C. Jackson

Physical Education vs. Degeneracy / H. W. Foster

On Being Civilized Too Much / Henry Charles Merwin

6. Promises of Formal Education

Negro Schoolmaster in the New South / W. E. Burghardt Du Bois

Modern College Education / John Brisben Walker

Greatest Need of College Girls / Annie Payson Call

School Days of an Indian Girl / Zitkala-Sa

March of Progress / Charles W. Chesnutt

Ingrate / Paul Laurence Dunbar

Genius of Bowlder Bluff / Abbe Carter Goodloe

7. Future & Cultural Change

What a Great City Might Be - A Lesson from the White City / John Coleman Adams

Problem of the West / Frederick J. Turner

Divorce of Man from Nature / Anna R. Weeks

Susan's Escort / Edward Everett Hale

Twenty-Four: Four / Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

Within an Ace of the End of the World / Robert Barr.