ABSTRACT
Some 150 years have passed since the end of the Civil War, and life in America—and on the rest of the planet—has profoundly changed. Two brutal world wars have totally revolutionized both geopolitics and the technological world. Televisions, jet airplanes, nuclear weapons, satellites, and computers are among the commonplaces of twenty-first century society of which there was no inkling in 1865. Yet, it can be argued that technologies do not define us as a people today any more than steam power or the telegraph defined Americans of the nineteenth century. What is important is in the way we approach life, and Americans of the nineteenth century would find much that they would recognize in modern American life.
