ABSTRACT
Modern America emerged during a forty-year crisis that began with the Civil War and ended with the war against Spain in 1898. At the Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1893, Americans celebrated their triumphs in industry and technology while, ironically, enduring the nation's worst economic depression. For in the late nineteenth century American technology, which had lagged behind British and French technology, suddenly developed and transformed the world with the electric light, typewriter, telephone, thermionic valve, automobile, and airplane. Thomas Edison's laboratory, which developed the incandescent bulb in 1879, had by 1901 turned into the General Electric Corporation's laboratory employing hundreds of skilled technicians. The garage where Henry Ford tinkered on his first horseless carriage had become a mechanized industrial complex. Not coincidentally, the U.S. saw its economy mature at the same time that it became a world power. McKinley and Congress devised classic solution in which the United States would enjoy power over, but have little daily responsibility for, Cubans.
