Word: moderners
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Sudden technological progress plus suddenly large cities produced modern media. We know that today's digital revolution obeys Moore's Law, the doubling of computers' microprocessing power every 18 to 24 months. I discovered a comparable dynamic operating back in the old days. With steam power and new rotary presses during the first half of the 19th century, printing speed doubled every few years, which meant many more and much cheaper newspapers with larger circulations, and new illustrated magazines. Scientific American, Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly all started between 1845 and 1857. The New York Sun, Herald, Tribune...
...Modern marketing was being invented as well. The 1840s saw the first national brands, the first department store, the first advertising agencies and the first presidential campaigns in which canny marketers refashioned upper-class candidates as rustic men of the people...
...Modern American culture was dawning too. Walt Whitman and Nathaniel Hawthorne had started work on Leaves of Grass and The Scarlet Letter, respectively, and Herman Melville was preparing to write Moby Dick. Henry David Thoreau, laying the groundwork for environmentalism, was altogether disgusted by the new Zeitgeist and gimcracks. "I delight to come to my bearings," he writes in Walden, which he began in the late '40s, "not walk in procession with pomp and parade, in a conspicuous place ... not to live in this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century, but stand or sit thoughtfully while it goes by. What...
...script suffers from unnecessary sex scenes, giving the impression that the directors deliberately added certain content to appeal to the unwashed masses. B-movie composer Tyler Bates scores a forgettable soundtrack, trying to balance “Lord of the Rings”-esque orchestral fare and low-budget modern rock; he fails on both fronts. The soundtrack lends little to the emotion and action of the film. This brings up another core problem: “300” lifts a lot from Peter Jackson’s trilogy—and is about as historically accurate. Understandably...
...month stay in Muncie, Indiana and their subsequent publication of “Middletown,” fulfilled Americans’ “desire for summations of society, and for expert techniques to analyze it, [which] stemmed from a heightened sense of living in ‘modern times,’” according to Igo. “Middletown” became a best-seller because it was understood to be representative of mainstream America—reviewers of the book even used “Middletown” and “America?...