Timeline 1800-1899: the decade of the 1890s

Tesla coil, Decadent art, skyscrapers, Cyrano, ragtime, and more.

Clockwise from upper left: Columbian Exposition {5/1/1893 US}, advertisement. Beardsley, “Apotheosis” illustration {1893-1894 Paint} for Wilde’s Salomé. Leighton, Flaming June {1895 Paint}. Re Spanish-American War {4/21/1898 US}: the American eagle with a 10,000-mile wingspan, in a cartoon of 1899. (Note the much smaller 1798 eagle in the inset.) New York World Building and skyscrapers in New York City {1890 Arch}: “Newspaper Row” ca. 1900, with (left to right) the headquarters of the New York World, New York Tribune, and New York Times. Mucha, Lady of the Camellias poster {1896 Paint}. Joplin, “Maple Leaf Rag” {9/18/1899 Music}, cover of sheet music, 1899. Rostand, Cyrano {1897 Drama}: image of the original Cyrano.

In this decade

• The arms race and the alliances that lead up to World War I

• US: Progressive movement, closing of the frontier, immigration restrictions, muckraking

• Economics: Sherman Antitrust Act, “robber barons”

• Science: Radiation, psychology, Tesla coil, diesel engine, the mind as a stream of consciousness

• Art: Mucha, Cyrano, Sullivan, skyscrapers, Joplin, Dracula

A few excerpts from the 1890s

I’d always wondered how Progressivism became popular in the greatest industrial age in history, in the greatest nation in history. In these excerpts from the 1890s, look at the assumptions, the things people are worried about, and how they propose to deal with them.

• Riis, How the Other Half Lives {1890 Nonfic}: “The tenements to-day are New York, harboring three-fourths of its population. When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?”

• Re Populist Party {1892-1896 US}, the Party’s Omaha Platform (7/4/1892) for the 1892 POTUS election: “We meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. ... The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of those, in turn, despise the republic and endanger liberty. From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice we breed the two great classes—tramps and millionaires.”

• Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth {1894 Econ}: “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty. ... The true laissez-faire is, let the individual do what the individual can do best, and let the community do what the community can do best. The laissez-faire of social self-interest, if true, cannot conflict with the individual self-interest, if true, but it must outrank it always.”

• Dewey, “My Pedagogic Creed” {1897 Educ}: “I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. … [T]he only true education comes through the stimulation of the child’s powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity.”

• Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray {1890-1891 Fic}, from Wilde’s Preface (1891): “We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.”

It takes more than the sense of life of Cyrano de Bergerac {1897 Drama} to fight against those sorts of attitudes and assumptions.

Upcoming

I’ll be spending July and August doing a final edit of Timeline 1800-1899, which should be for sale by September 2026. I’ll be offering signed pre-publication copies as soon as I have a page count and a price. (The index on this one is going to be looooong.)

The next installment for paid subscribers will be the “World in 1900”, in September - the beginning of Timeline 1900-2021. In the meantime, I’ll be posting art from the 19th century.