ABSTRACT
Fin-de-siecle America was a place of great change. Just catching their breath after the traumas of the Civil War, Americans found themselves in a rapidly evolving era. Immigrants poured into the country, some of whom posed a challenge to the predominantly Protestant and northern European heritage of the nation. Between 1860 and 1890, ten million immigrants entered the United States; most of these people settled in cities. And as the American economy industrialized and corporations grew in size, the urban areas grew even larger. Between 1890 and 1920, eighteen million more immigrants entered the United States. Many of these “new immigrants,” hailing from southern and eastern Europe, settled in urban locations. The nation, predominantly rural for over one hundred years, became a nation of urbanites. In 1880 nearly one-half of the population of the northeastern states lived in settlements of four thousand or more, and by 1890 onethird of all Americans lived in settlements of twenty-five hundred or more.1 A great change was taking place; a change which upset Americans’ conceptions of themselves. Where there had once been a Protestant, rural and agricultural nation, a new type of republic took root, based on industry and large corporations instead of farms, cities instead of country, and a polyglot population instead of a more homogenous, AngloSaxon one. This transformation unsettled many Americans.
