Word: moderners
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...totally imbalanced it was enough for only a small wave-initially, the mere rumor of regulatory changes designed to cool China's stock fever-to sink the ship. On Feb. 27, China's main stock index fell 8.8%. Because of the huge leverage and increased computer trading that characterize modern finance, this sell-off triggered sharp declines in other markets from Russia to Malaysia, Japan...
Back in the U.S., it took only a year after the discovery of gold to turn the sleepy little town of San Francisco into a boisterous city, the largest place west of Chicago. Modern California was born. More important, the Gold Rush was a ratification of the most fantastical version of the American Dream, the yearning for instant fortune and easy prosperity, for extreme liberty and land free for the taking from the natives. When they heard the news out of California, Marx and Engels understood that this bizarre phenomenon was another way in which the U.S. might not conform...
...accurate reckoning of the late 1840s as well. And while it's an excellent parlor game to point out the resonant particulars--history really does rhyme, if not repeat itself--I've also become sincerely convinced that that mid--19th century moment is, more than any other, when modern American life really began. The future--that is, our present--came into sight. The way we live now is the way we started to live then...
...immigrants in the early '40s, only dozens a year, increased 10 or 20 times during the middle of the decade, and then, with the Gold Rush, by more than another order of magnitude in 1849 alone. And just as the Western exodus reached full speed, American cities became true modern metropolises. In 1800, New York had only 60,000 people, but by the middle of the century, the population had grown to half a million. Filling the cities was the first tsunami of immigrants--in particular the Irish, driven to the U.S. by the famine that began...
Radically modern new modes of thought flowered as well. Charles Darwin was quietly and carefully constructing the theory of evolution that he would introduce to the dumbstruck world a decade later. In American politics, abolitionism was just beginning to move from the left wing into the mainstream. Feminism officially launched in August 1848 in upstate New York, at a convention of reformers who issued a shockingly stark declaration of women's rights, demanding suffrage...