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Bringing the City Back In: Space and Place in the Urban History of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

James Connolly
Affiliation:
Ball State University

Extract

Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward sought to understand the social consequences of industrialization by looking at a city. One of the Gilded Age's best-selling books, the Utopian novel magically transported lead character Julian West to a futuristic Boston set in the year 2000 and contrasted that ideal, cooperative world with the harsh reality of individualism-drenched, industrial Boston in 1887. Bellamy's vision of a twenty-first-century city was prescient about technology: it included automation, mass communication, and swift transportation. His social predictions proved less successful. Boston in the year 2000 was populated by Victorian ladies and gentlemen and lacked the cultural variety we associate with contemporary city life.

Type
Essays
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2002

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References

Thanks to Robert Johnston, Dan Goffman, Maureen Flanagan, and the anonymous JGAPE reader for helpful comments and suggestions.

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28 Wingerd, “City Limits.”

29 Ibid., 3.

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