Late-nineteenth-century change outpaced even our accelerated modern rate.

Evidence

To those who lived through this epoch, what was most striking was simply the overwhelmingly accelerated pace of change itself. We often speak easily about the rapid pace of change in our own time. However, nothing in the experience of the average American at the end of the twentieth century matches the wrenching transformation experienced at the beginning of the century by an immigrant raised as a peasant in a Polish village little changed from the sixteenth century who within a few years was helping to construct the avant-garde skyscrapers of Louis Sullivan in the city of “big shoulders” beside Lake Michigan. Even for native-born Americans, the pace of change in the last decades of the nineteenth century was extraordinary. As Bostonian Henry Adams later wrote of his own boyhood. “The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1319

Categorization

• CANDY: Henry Adams’s line ‘The American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900’ is a great elevator-conversation fact for dampening modern-change exceptionalism.
• XREF: connects to: Pre-modern societies underwent change without experiencing it as accelerated rupture — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 409

Broader Connections

• Pre-modern societies underwent change without experiencing it as accelerated rupture #qualifies (0.80) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 409