ABSTRACT
By the 1870s, more than a dozen cities, from Pittsburgh and Chicago to Kansas City, were industrial centers that belonged to a new age of steam and steel rather than the agrarian past. For most of human history, however, people existed in the stage of savagery. Powell played a central role in the foundation of professional anthropology in the United States. He continued Wyman's archaeological investigations of coastal shellmiddens and began to explore mounds in the Ohio Valley, ruins in the Southwest, and glacial deposits for traces of Ice Age inhabitants in the Americas. As important as the expansion of industrial production and the closing of the Western frontier in shaping everyday life and popular culture during the Age of the Robber Barons were the genocidal and ethnocidal attacks on American Indians and the rising tide of discrimination against African-Americans and immigrants.
