Word: 1880s
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Rauschenberg became to American art in the 1950s and '60s what Whitman was to American poetry in the 1880s--the Great Permitter, with his declared hope to "act in the gap between art and life." This, one wants to say, is the artist of American democracy, yearningly faithful to its clamor, its contradictions, its hope and its enormous demotic freedom, all of which find shape in his work. Other American artists have had this ambition--one thinks of Robert Henri and the Ashcan painters at the turn of the century--but none fulfilled it so well...
...graying of America also challenges traditional notions of retirement that once made a worker's 65th birthday a career ender. That milestone--decreed by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1880s when the average life expectancy was just 45--typically came with a party and a pension, plus plenty of time for golf and the grandkids. But many seniors today are moving on to new careers, not only because they can use the money but also because they can and want to keep working...
...Bernini of the swells was Richard Morris Hunt (1827-95), the most influential American architect of the 19th century. The poor have always wondered how the rich live. But more to the point in America, the rich have always wondered too. Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport...
Jude Fawley, the Dorset country lad in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, doesn't want much--just to go to a university and live happily with his one true love, his cousin Sue Bridehead. But in the England of the 1880s, the peasant class was a prison from which few escaped, and love beyond the laws of propriety makes the lovers outcasts. Yet Jude stays stubbornly true to his desperate dreams. He will read his Latin authors and endure his pariah status with Sue "as long as it takes for the world to change...
...genius the 19th century West created." He is none other than William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody, the former Indian fighter and buffalo hunter whose touring "Wild West" show forever fixed the myth of the West for the rest of the world. Cody's show, which began touring in the 1880s, re-created Indian attacks on wagon trains and raids on settlers' villages, with Buffalo Bill always riding to the rescue. As a grand finale, the show even re-enacted Custer's defeat at Little Bighorn. Buffalo Bill arrived there too, but this time accompanied by a sign: TOO LATE...